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> Emulation just means "to imitate another system". Is an AMD CPU an Intel "emulator"? If one piece of hardware aims to be compatible with another, pre-existi
by haberman 5y ago
> Emulation just means "to imitate another system".
Is an AMD CPU an Intel "emulator"?
If one piece of hardware aims to be compatible with another, pre-existing piece of hardware, I wouldn't call it an emulator. Maybe an implementation.
Sure there can be bugs, and a very advanced software emulator may have better compatibility than a less advanced hardware implementation. But a hardware implementation is fundamentally functioning much more similarly to how the original hardware functioned. Parallel logic gates are quite a different programming paradigm than sequential software.
- CJefferson 5y agoYes, I agree an AMD chip isn't an Intel emulator. However, if we were imagining an intel CPU inside a console like a Super Nintendo or Megadrive, then an "AMD CPU" wouldn't be good enough -- lots of games require bug compatability of undocumented instructions, and exact behaviour in terms of memory access, instruction execution (including how partial instruction execution effects memory + registers). People at Analogue aren't just making something which implements the same instruction set, they have to implement exact behaviour in all ways. Nowadays people don't write games which require that level of compatability, which is why (mostly) games work on both Intel + AMD.