Transmeta - Wikipedia
Transmeta Corporation was an American fabless semiconductor company based in Santa Clara, California. It developed low power x86 compatible microprocessors based on a VLIW core and a software layer called Code Morphing Software.
Code Morphing Software (CMS) consisted of an interpreter, a runtime system and a dynamic binary translator. x86 instructions were first interpreted one instruction at a time and profiled, then depending upon the frequency of execution of a code block, CMS would progressively generate more optimized translations.[3][4][5]
The VLIW core implemented features specifically designed to accelerate CMS and translations. Among the features were support for general speculation, detection of memory aliasing and detection of self modifying x86 code.[3][4][5]
The combination of CMS and the VLIW core allowed for the achievement of full x86 compatibility while maintaining performance and reducing power consumption.[3][4][5]
