What is the difference between hardware and software emulation?

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I understand that software emulation is an application that imitates another computer and its hardware but I looked at the wiki page for hardware emulation and I’m completely lost. Is it like building a computer with the exact same logic and architecture as the original machine without actually being exactly the same so it functions the same? I’m so confused.

In: Technology

3 Answers

Anonymous 0 Comments

My understanding is that software emulation focuses on emulating the parts of the hardware needed for software to run (sometimes a specific type of software) while hardware emulation attempts to emulate the underlying hardware. This allows testing of the hardware functionality but is also more resource intensive than software emulation.

Software emulation may not implement features the same way the original hardware did while hardware emulation will attempt to simulate the exact behavior of the original hardware.

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