What's the difference between simulation and emulation

Question

I frequently see Simulation and Emulation in computer science. These two terms seem synonymous. Is there any difference between Simulation and Emulation?

Answer 1

Yes, the concepts are different.

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Simulation

A simulation is a system that behaves similar to something else, but is implemented in an entirely different way. It provides the basic behaviour of a system, but may not necessarily adhere to all of the rules of the system being simulated. It is there to give you an idea about how something works.

Example

Think of a flight simulator as an example. It looks and feels like you are flying an airplane, but you are completely disconnected from the reality of flying the plane, and you can bend or break those rules as you see fit. For example, fly an Airbus A380 upside down between London and Sydney without breaking it.

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Emulation

An emulation is a system that behaves exactly like something else, and adheres to all of the rules of the system being emulated. It is effectively a complete replication of another system, right down to being binary compatible with the emulated system's inputs and outputs, but operating in a different environment to the environment of the original emulated system. The rules are fixed, and cannot be changed, or the system fails.

Example

The M.A.M.E. system is built around this very premise. All those old arcade systems that have been long forgotten, that were implemented almost entirely in hardware, or in the firmware of their hardware systems can be emulated right down to the original bugs and crashes that would occur when you reached the highest possible score.

Answer 2

A simulation is a model constructed of something else which reproduces some of that thing's features and leaves others out - obviously you want to preserve the features relevant to your query, and leave out the irrelevant ones.

For instance, a simulation of early-morning commuter traffic leaves out the commuter's names, and maybe even their identities (using a counter variable rather than an actual set of Commuter objects), but it cannot disregard their rate of arrival.

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Emulation is the running of a software X created for platform A on platform B, without changing the software itself. This requires building a model of A that runs on B, and obviously it has to model everything about A that involves code execution. (In theory you could omit support for opcodes that you know this particular software won't ever use, but that is rare - doing an emulator is hard work, and it's much more worthwhile to do a thorough job and have something reusable than a kludge that works only for S.)

Answer 3

Both means something doing the job of something else.

The difference is that "Simulation" happens at a conscious level (with respect to the user) and is finalized typically to anticipate the result of a reality without touching the reality itself.

"Emulation" happens at an unconscious level, and has the purpose to replace an underlying component with another different one that -in respect to the user- works as the old one.

In other words, simulation happen in a "parallel world", while emulation happens in a "replaced world".

Answer 4

Technically, they both do the same: do something in an environment that acts as if it were the real thing.

Conceptually, however, there is an important difference.

A simulation is supposed to be detached from the real world to a certain degree; the output of a simulation is not directly connected to the thing it simulates. For example, an aircraft simulator does not actually fly, and the pilot is not actually communicating with a real air traffic controller.

A simulation usually has the goal of testing or predicting some real-life process in a safe environment; because the simulation is disconnected from the real world, nothing really bad can happen (a crashed aircraft simulator never kills real people).

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An emulation, by contrast, has the goal of taking the place of the real thing: for example, if you emulate a simple microcontroller using a more sophisticated programmable CPU, that CPU can be used in place of the original microcontroller; it will be physically connected to some machine, and it will actually control that machine just like the microcontroller would.

The goal of an emulation is to replace hardware or software components with functional equivalents when the original modules aren't available (or have become too expensive, if only to maintain). Emulation can also serve the goal of using hardware more flexibly - the same programmable microcontroller can double for several simpler controllers, switching emulation mode as needed.

Answer 5

While the etymology isn't strictly accurate, think about the difference between sympathy, "I can imagine what that must feel like" and empathy, "I know what that feels like." A simulation might include visual representation of a problem, but it might not. For example it might just print out columns of numbers representing how many people are lined up for something or total revenue or average speed. It has some characteristics that match reality, and some that don't.

Emulation, which is often used in the context of one platform pretending to be another platform, is far more complete. So Windows Phone developers can run or debug their phone apps on a Windows machine in an emulator, which looks like a phone and behaves like one too. You can run your old Commodore 64 games in an emulator, too.

The words aren't precise. Most flight simulators are more like emulators in my opinion, but the name has stuck from a time when they were not so immersive. Some people reserve the word emulator for the cross-platform case and reject it for anything else. You'll probably never be thought wrong if you do the same when speaking, but understand that some people may place the boundary between the two words a little differently, and make allowances when someone says "this is an emulation" for a really accurate and complete simulation.

Answer 6

Both terms are very much similar in concept - mimicking.

Simulation or Simulators make use of software to produce a replicated system that is very much similar to target model in respect to its underlying core functionality(especially its basic methodology).

Emulators, on the other hand, focus more on exterior similarity when compared to target system. It has minimum concern for "how" the functions are mimicked. Emulators are, in general, used when working in a completely different environment(For example a different Operating system) as compared to the original system.