Back then Intel was stuck with a classic CISC architecture that did not scale well.

What transmeta did was to keep the x86 instruction set (CISC) but internally convert them to a simpler RISC-ish instruction set and run it in a much simpler and power effective RISC core.

Intel copied this idea which allowed P4 (maybe already PIII?) to make a giant performance leap. Nowadays all high performance CISC CPUs from AMD and Intel do this.