Visit Wikipedia, in the search field type "virtual machine" but do not hit enter or search. Notice the text in the immediate results says "software that emulates an entire computer." Now, visit the page[1]: "...a virtual machine (VM) is an emulation of a computer system." This says nothing about whether the virtualization is entirely software, assisted by hardware, or entirely hardware.

A "software virtual machine" is a disambiguation that I chose indicating that the "machine" is implemented entirely in software with no help from special silicon (contrast with [2]). I can't fathom why that would be so controversial.

The entire thread comes down to this: the demo of x86 Linux running on Apple Silicon could very easily have been running in a virtual machine made entirely of software. No one claimed, as I recall, that Silicon implemented any hardware assistance for executing x86 code. There might even be IP issues doing that (IP - intellectual property, not "internet protocol".)

See also [3]

1 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virtual_machine

2 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hardware_virtualization

3 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_platform_virtual...