Comment by littlestymaar
3 years ago
> Yes, those people are writing hardware emulators. Doesn't mean they're the only "real" kind.
They're the only kind that doesn't involve a super broad definition of what the word “emulation” means (so broad that most computing actually fits in this definition).
> As for my Intel CPU, it isn't pretending to be another kind of CPU.
Until one day you realize that you can run an x86 program on a 64 bit CPU (but fortunately, this isn't done through “emulation” proper either).
> Until one day you realize that you can run an x86 program on a 64 bit CPU (but fortunately, this isn't done through “emulation” proper either).
It's reasonable to call that emulation if there's a separate layer for it translating to/from x86-64, rather than the hardware specifically supporting -32. My CPU isn't doing that cause I'm not running 32-bit software on macOS.