Transmeta's whole elevator pitch was a power efficient CPU that through translation software, happened to run x86 instructions so there's no porting nonsense necessary. Only issue was that they made it 1/x efficient, at 1/x the speed.

Interesting fact is that the guy who architected Transmeta's CPUs also worked on Itanium and Russia's Elbrus CPUs. The Elbrus is sort of a spiritual successor to Transmeta's efforts at this translation thing, but it is very much aimed as a hardware root of trust solution to sandboxing software rather than a genuine effort at competing in foreign markets.

Who was that guy?