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> the emulator would just select

What is “the emulator” here? If it’s the original CPU, you’re just trading off some of its computing power to a slower, emulated CPU.

For emulating a CPU, you don’t need a lot of storage, and it’s much faster to use main memory (RAM) instead of using SSD memory. What you need for emulating a CPU, however, is computing power, and only another CPU can provide that.

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Emulator can be a program with some type of linked list, whose core can emulate computations, which may be stored on various types of memory. In some types of emergencies when all CPUs and RAMs are busy, it can be handy. Maybe part of computational operations (like comparisons) can be done by CPU. Truth tables are essentially the already computed results of basic AND/OR/XOR operations, so at least these operations may be emulated on a storage via selection of a predefined result of computation. But whatever (I hope I won't run out of functionality provided by 2 cores).

While you could conceivably speed up emulation by using huge stored lookup tables (I don’t think it’s really possible though, SSD is just too slow compared to RAM and CPU caches), it’ll still be considerably slower than using the CPU directly, instead of having it emulate a virtual CPU by use of those lookup tables. In other words, you would be losing compute power in sum, instead of gaining more.

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