[3] The Transmeta founders credit a simplified sketch of their proposed architecture, which they called the "amoeba," with convincing the financial community that their idea could work. In this concept, the x86 architecture is an ill-defined amoeba containing such features as segmentation, ASCII arithmetic, and variable-length instructions; the square inside the blob is the proposed VLIW processor and its functions.

IEEE Spectrum May 2000 Volume 37 Number 5