What is Hardware Emulation?

Emulation means translating commands of a guest machine into commands of a host machine, which are then executed on the host machine. This makes the host machine much more extensively usable, whether for development purposes or for running programs in a wide variety of environments.
 

What is a Hardware Emulation?

With this type of emulation, all operations, including those of the CPU, are emulated. The emulator takes instructions in a certain instruction set and displays these instructions on another machine. This is associated with computational effort and thus reduces the computing power available for the actual application.
 

 

When do you use Hardware Emulation?

One application is the development of a new instruction set. This can be freely selected and is then tested with an emulator before the new machine is implemented in hardware.
The same is possible if you want to run a program for a machine that is not available to you. This can also be an old device that is no longer available.
 

Advantages

The advantage is that programs can also be executed for completely different CPUs than those actually available.
 

Disadvantage

The disadvantage is that you lose more computing power with this method than with other virtualization options. With hardware virtualization instead of hardware emulation, the CPU itself is not emulated. The instructions are only passed on, which means that only systems with the same CPU architecture can be displayed. However, this works at a higher speed.
 

Hardware emulation examples

The Bochs system is written in C++ and is available as an open-source. It can emulate various x86 CPUs, but also AMD processors. For example, with Bochs, it is possible to run the Win95 system on a Unix workstation.
PearPC is also programmed in C++ and is allowed to run on today’s hardware systems that use a PowerPC architecture.
 

Conclusion

Hardware emulation: The main characteristic of which is high flexibility. An abstraction layer is inserted between an application system and the existing hardware, which enormously expands the possible uses of the existing machine. The loss of computing power for emulation will become less and less noticeable in the near future, as the computing power of new hardware will continue to increase.
 

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