1 hour ago, BruceMcF said:
Quite so ... any abstract distinction is prone to running into border cases like that.
Exactly. Someone else brought up that very point regarding microcode. The other side in the debate seemed unwilling to accept that anything other than a 100% transistor for transistor, mask identical copy, is "real" and everything else is "emulation".
Now, to be fair to them, their point was that emulation is often used in a pejorative sense and that it isn't a dirty word and that calling FPGA emulation isn't meant as a bad thing. My point was "you can have good and bad software emulation, and you can have good and bad FPGA implementations; the difference is not the tools, it is the craftsman using the tools; regardless, words and more than the sum of their dictionary definitions, and quality software emulation is sufficiently different than quality FPGA 'emulation' that they deserve different words to describe them".
Edit: Fixed a typo and "the difference is the tools" should have been "the difference is not the tools, it is the craftsman using the tools". Too little time spent proofreading.