eli5: What does people mean when they say that a computer system runs on different architecture from another computer? Like when somebody says that an emulator can run N64 games faster theoretically but because of different architecture in practicality it cant?

Question

eli5: What does people mean when they say that a computer system runs on different architecture from another computer? Like when somebody says that an emulator can run N64 games faster theoretically but because of different architecture in practicality it cant?

In: Technology

Answer 1

Like you are five: different computer chips have different architectures, which are like different languages. At the most basic level, a x64 architecture might look like English, but an ARM architecture might look like Spanish, and a SPARC might look like Russian. The alphabets might be similar, but they have different meaning. One word in one architecture would be a completely different meaning on another (“gris” is Spanish is gray, but “gris” is Swedish is pig). In order to make a program for one architecture work on another, you have to run it through a translation first (an emulator) to make sure that not only to individual words (operarions) translate properly, but entire sentences or novels (applications).

If the host computer looks enough like the client being emulated, it theoretically could be faster (for example, x64 is a descendant of x86, and can run x86 programs natively, but an ARM cannot run x86 without a translation layer).