What happened to Transmeta, the last big dotcom IPO

Not to the same level. Crusoe was, in many ways, more classic CISC than x86 - except it's microcode was actually doing dynamic translation to internal ISA instead of operating like interpreter in old CISCs.

x86 ISA had the funny advantage of being way closer to RISC than "beloved" CISC architectures of old like m68k or VAX. Many common instructions translate to single "RISCy" instruction for the internal microarchitecture (something AMD noted IIRC in the original K5 with its AMD29050-derived core as "most instructions translate to 1 internal microinstruction, some between 2 to 4"). X86 prefixes are also way simpler than the complicated logic of decoding m68k or VAX. An instruction with multiple prefixes will quite probably decode to single microinstruction.

That said, there's funny thing in that Transmeta tech survived quite a long way to the point that there were Android tablets, in fact flagship Google ones like Nexus 9, whose CPU was based on it - because nvidia "Denver" architecture used same technology (AFAIK licensed from Transmeta, but don't cite me on this)

> Many common [x86] instructions translate to single "RISCy" instruction for the internal microarchitecture

And then there are read-modify-write instructions, which on modern CPUs need two address-generation μops in addition to the load one, the store one, and the ALU one. So the underlying load-store architecture is very visible.

There’s also the part where we’ve trained ourselves out of using the more CISCy parts of x86 like ENTER, BOUND, or even LOOP, because they’ve been slow for ages, and thus they stay slow.

Even many of the more complex instructions often can translate into surprisingly short sequences - all sorts of loop structures have now various kinds of optimizations including instruction fusion that probably would not be necessary if we didn't stop using higher level LOOP constructs ;-)

But for example REP MOVS now is fused into equivalent of using SSE load-stores (16 bytes) or even AVX-512 load stores (64 bytes).

And of course equivalent of LEA by using ModRM/SIB prefixes is pretty much free with it being AFAIK handled as pipeline step

>something AMD noted IIRC in the original K5 with its AMD29050-derived core

Just a small nitpick: I've seen the K5/29050 connection mentioned in a number of places, but the K5 was actually based upon an un-released superscalar 29K project called "Jaguar", not the 29050, which was a single-issue, in-order design.

There's levels of microcode.

It's not too uncommon for each pipeline stage or so to have their own uop formats as each stage computes what it was designed to and culls what later stages don't need.

Because of this it's not that weird to see both a single rmw uops at, says the initial decode and microcode layer, that then gets cracked into the different uops for the different functional units later on.