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ARM used to build their own models. By hand. They had an instruction-set simulator (ISS) called ARMulator that was largely intended for software development, and cycle-accurate models that were intended to run within digital simulators for development of the hardware of ARM-based systems.

 There were two problems with this approach. Firstly, ARMulator was built using interpretive technology and consumed approximately 1000 host instructions to simulate each ARM instruction so ran at a few MIPS. Modern virtual platform models use Just-In-Time (JIT) compilation, cross-compiling the ARM code into host instructions and so avoiding any interpreter overhead (the compiler creates overhead but that is minimal for instruction sequences executed many times). They thus run hundreds of times faster, fast enough to boot operating systems and debug industrial-sized loads of embedded software.

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