Transmeta wasn't x86 internally but decoded x86 instructions. Retrobytes did a history of transmeta not too long ago and the idea was essentially to be able to be compatible with any cpu uarch. Alas by the time it shipped only x86 was relevant. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U2aQTJDJwd8

Actually, the reason Transmeta CPUs were so slow was that they didn't have an x86 instruction hardware decoder. Every code cache (IIRC it was only 32 MB) miss resulted in a micro-architectural trap which translated x86 instructions to the underlying uops in software.