The LLVM translator strives for correct and efficient translation from PTX to x86 that will hopefully make CUDA an effective way of programming multicore CPUs as well as GPUs. The emulator attempts to faithfully implement the PTX 1.4 and PTX 2.1 specifications which may include features older GPUs do not support. I've demonstrated the emulator on systems without NVIDIA GPUs. GPU Ocelot ( of which I am one of the core contributors) can be compiled without CUDA device drivers (libcuda.so) installed if you wish to use the Emulator or LLVM backends. This response may be too late, but it's worth noting anyway.