What’s the difference between an emulator and a virtual machine?

Question

What’s the difference between an emulator and a virtual machine?

In: Technology

Answer 1

A virtual machine uses the host machine’s own CPU to run. They are two machines sharing the same processor, the host (physical) machine and the virtual one. This means that the virtual machine can only run an OS that supports the CPU of the host machine.

An emulator is a program that implements a CPU in software. So you have a program that pretends to be, say, an Intel CPU, but this program itself runs on something different, like, say, an Apple M1.