[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] Transmeta was founded in 1995 by Bob Cmelik, Dave Ditzel, Colin Hunter, Ed Kelly, Doug Laird, Malcolm Wing and Greg Zyner.

On November 12, 1999, a cryptic comment in the HTML appeared:[19] Yes, there is a secret message, and this is it: Transmeta's policy has been to remain silent about its plans until it had something to demonstrate to the world.

Crusoe will be unconventional, which is why we wanted to let you know in advance to come look at the entire Web site in January, so that you can get the full story and have access to all of the real details as soon as they are available.

On January 19, 2000, Transmeta held a launch event at Villa Montalvo in Saratoga, California[21] and announced to the world that it had been working on an x86 compatible dynamic binary translation processor named Crusoe.

[22] Also, while Crusoe was in development, Intel and AMD significantly ramped up speeds and began to address concerns about power consumption.

The greater size and power consumption may have diluted a key market advantage Transmeta's chips had previously enjoyed over the competition.

On May 31, 2005, Transmeta announced the signing of asset purchase and license agreements with Hong Kong’s Culture.com Technology Limited.

The deal fell apart due to delays in obtaining technology export licenses from the US Department of Commerce and the parties announced the termination of the agreements on February 9, 2006.

[9] Subsequently, AMD invested $7.5 million in Transmeta, planning to use the company's patent portfolio in energy-efficient technologies.

[13] On November 17, Transmeta announced the signing of a definitive agreement to be acquired by Novafora, a digital video processor company based in Santa Clara, California, for $255.6 million in cash, subject to adjustments dependent on working capital.

[29] Intellectual Venture Funding LLC[30] completed the acquisition of the patent portfolio formerly developed and owned by Transmeta Corporation on February 4, 2009.

Partially because of the presence of these figures, the industry was constantly abuzz with rumors and 'conspiracy theories' resulting in excellent press relations.

[citation needed] Transmeta lost much credibility and endured significant criticism due to the large discrepancies between projected performance and power consumption and the actual results.

Although power consumption was somewhat better than Intel and AMD offerings, the end user experience (i.e. battery life) only showed a marginal overall improvement.

[37][failed verification] First, the Code Morphing Software (CMS) combined with cache architecture artificially inflated comparisons between benchmarks and real-world applications.

The notion of selling a product into a specific thermal envelope was typically not understood by the mass of reviewers, who tended to compare Efficeon to the gamut of x86 microprocessors, regardless of power consumption or application.

One such example of this criticism suggests the performance still significantly lagged behind Intel's Pentium M (Banias) and AMD's Mobile Athlon XP.

[39] Transmeta processors were in-order very long instruction word (VLIW) cores running a special dynamic binary translation software layer which together implemented compatibility with the x86 architecture.

[3][4][5] Similar technologies existed in the 1990s: Wabi for Solaris and Linux, FX!32 for Alpha and IA-32 EL for Itanium, open-source DAISY,[45] the Mac 68K emulator for the PowerPC.

The ability to quickly update products without a hardware respin was demonstrated in 2002 with an in-the-field upgrade (a download) to enhance CPU performance of the Crusoe based HP Compaq TC1000 tablet PC.

In the field upgrades were rare in practice due to system hardware vendors not wanting to incur additional customer support costs or spend additional money on QA for the potential upgrades or bug fixes to shipped products they had already closed the revenue books on.

In conjunction with its code-morphing software the Efficeon most closely mirrors the feature set of Intel Pentium 4 processors, although, like AMD Opteron processors, it supports a fully integrated memory controller, a HyperTransport IO bus, and the NX bit, or no-execute x86 extension to PAE mode.

Additionally, Efficeon code morphing software (CMS) reserved a small portion of main memory (typically 32 MB) for its cache of dynamically translated x86 instructions.

However, writing in 2003, Linus Torvalds apparently dismissed these approaches as unrealistic:[46][47] The native crusoe code – even if it was documented and available – is not very conducive to general-purpose OS stuff.

It has no notion of memory protection, and there's no MMU for code accesses, so things like kernel modules simply wouldn't work.

If you ever see a machine with a prominent notice saying "CMS upgraded to development version", then that's a hint that it's a machine that TMTA developers could change.Subsequent reverse engineering, published in 2004, clarifies some details of the native VLIW architecture and associated instruction set, and suggests that there are fundamental limitations that preclude porting an operating system such as Linux to it.