Wasn't that similar to those Transmeta processors that had most of their instruction set written in software? Seemed like a cool idea, but (as I recall) the Transmeta processors couldn't keep up speed-wise with the existing x86 CPU's.
They weren't great but for a small, ambitious company without much chance to iterate they definitely weren't bad.
The technology got incorporated into NVIDIA's Project Denver ARM chips, which were very fast… sometimes. Actually, Denver 2 is shipping in the new Jetson devkit, but I haven't seen much about that or been able to get my hands on one.
That's the general problem with VLIW chips, is that they're amazing on some workloads and pretty bad on others. Itanium, for all its faults, was by far the best general-purpose VLIW CPU.
Your comment about VLIW is true, but in this case that was a 2nd order effect. Far far worse was The effect of the JIT (CMS): a small kernel running over a long time (e.g., DVD playback) would work absolutely excellently, even on the Crusoe, whereas a large codebase with relatively little reuse (say, Word) would give very uneven performance. This problem was never solved [at Transmeta].
The irony is that today, x86 compability is irrelevant in most places.
One thing I've thought about is having a code-morphing CPU as a sort of accelerator that a single process could be offloaded to (of course, this would require an OS that can marshal processes). Think a database server, a JVM, NodeJS—long-running processes that would benefit from JIT.
Might even be viable with upcoming cache-coherent interconnects like CCIX and GenZ. A more ambitious implementation could offload groups of functions.
I would credit them for pushing Intel (and AMD) to optimize for power savings rather than raw speed, because Intel started making significant perf/W improvements.
Transmeta processors were (I believe) the first x86 processors to automatically vary voltage and clock speed multiple times per second. In fact, I wrote a small utility that would display the current clock speed on your taskbar in a graph because it changed so rapidly.
Anyone remember Moblin? Apparently Intel started work on that Linux distro because Microsoft balked regarding an x86 platform without PCI device lookup. And Intel removed the PCI stuff in an effort to cut power drain.
As an aside, running windows on ARM to this day require special SoCs.
You still needed to add a display controller but that was true of all the competing CPUs too.