Running Modern LLMs on a 2016 IBM POWER8 in 2026

What Are We Even Doing Here? It&rsquo;s 2026. Most people run LLMs on NVIDIA H100s, AMD MI300X, or at least a decent gaming GPU. I&rsquo;m running them on a 2016 IBM POWER8 server with 160 hardware threads and zero CUDA cores. Why? Because I can. And because nobody else has published POWER8 LLM benchmarks in 2026. And because alternative architectures deserve love too. This post covers: Building…