Addendum:

> I don't think any of this makes a difference when emulating/virtualizing
> the systems with QEMU/KVM.

It seems using QEMU/KVM to virtualize (as opposed to emulate) Power ISA CPUs (except POWER8 and POWER9) is not possible on the Talos II:

"On to QEMU. Using the generic Power Mac profile mac99 both MacOS 9.1 and 10.4 start up largely happily under qemu-system-ppc [...]. However, while it was certainly useable, it didn't feel very fast. The System Profiler within the emulated Tiger instance said it was a "1GHz G4" with a "400MHz FSB." This seemed low, and the reason it is was ... drumroll please ... it was running with CPU emulation. After some checking, I confirmed KVM was indeed installed on this system, so I tried running a 64-bit guest with qemu-system-ppc64 emulating an IBM pSeries machine with KVM-HV. That started up and ran at a nice clip, noticeably faster when I turned on KVM, so I tried to run the 32-bit guest with KVM-PR (which ought to emulate the proper CPU) and got an error message. Even the 64-bit guest that ran just dandy with KVM-HV wouldn't run with KVM-PR. Some digging determined that the KVM-PR kernel module existed, but did not load. Some more digging turned up that KVM-PR wouldn't load with modprobe. Even more digging turned up that ... KVM-PR doesn't run on bare-metal POWER9 yet, and unfortunately all PowerNV machines like the T2 are bare-metal."
http://tenfourfox.blogspot.com/2018/05/a-weekend-on-new-computer-or.html