Comment Re:To answer your question (Score 3, Informative) 279
As to Transmeta, the company that bought them was nVidia. Their Project Denver chips use a lot of the Transmeta ideas. They're particularly interesting in terms of history, as the project was several years along before they decided on the ISA (they spent a while trying to license the relevant patents from Intel to build an x86 chip, failed and went with ARMv8 - which may end up being a strategic error for Intel). Unlike the Transmeta chips, it has a hardware ARM decoder that generates horribly inefficient VLIW instructions from ARM code. This helps alleviate the startup penalty that the older Transmeta chips had, where they had to JIT compile every instruction sequence the first time they encountered it and then run it from their translation cache. The nVidia chips can run the code as soon as they pull it into the instruction cache and can profile it before doing the translation.