SYSTEM AND METHOD FOR IMPROVING THE EFFICIENCY OF APPLICATION EMULATION ACCELERATION

An improved emulator for analyzing software code, and associated method. The emulator includes a virtual execution environment in which a series of virtual processing states are represented during emulation of a first portion of the software code, and a hardware accelerator that performs an initialization of the computing hardware to directly execute a second portion of the software code under investigation without emulation thereof in the virtual execution environment. An efficiency assessment module determines a measure of efficiency of performing the executing of the second portion of the software code under investigation without emulation thereof, and an acceleration decision module performs selection of the second portion of the software code under investigation to be directly executed by the hardware accelerator module based on the determined measure of efficiency.