abstract:Code Morphing Software (CMS) is the technology used by Transmeta microprocessors to execute x86 instructions.The Transmeta Code Morphing Software: Using Speculation, Recovery, and Adaptive Retranslation to Address Real-Life Challenges - Appeared in the Proceedings of the First Annual IEEE/ACM International Symposium on Code Generation and Optimization, 27–29 March 2003, San Francisco, California In broad view, CMS reads x86 instructions and generates instructions for a proprietary VLIW processor, in the style of Shade.
For example, once the code-morphing software has translated a particular chunk of x86 code into micro-ops it can store the translated chunk in a special memory to avoid having to translate it again.