[ Thanks to Jeffrey L.
Taylor for this link. ]
“It took Transmeta engineers $100 million, five years of
secret toil, and a little magic to create fast low-power chips that
turn into x86s in a microsecond.“
“Transmeta Corp.’s Crusoe chips, due to ship in May or June,
look nothing like Intel Corp.’s Pentium processors. In fact, they
do not even have a logic gate in common. They are smaller, consume
between one-third and one-30th the power (depending on the
application), and implement none of the same instructions in
hardware.”
“But the Crusoe microprocessors can run the same software that
runs on IBM PC-compatible personal computers with Pentium
chips–for instance, Microsoft Windows or versions of Unix, along
with their software applications.”