In my regards it seems that one of their sources of inspiration were Transmeta processors - VLIW core, software translator from some intermediate bytecode (x86 in case of transmeta).
I hope they will get it better this time.
Well, the plan is to distribute an intermediate representation and then specialize it to the particular mill pipeline the first time you load the binary. Probably a lot easier than translating something that wasn't designed for it.
I believe IBM mainframes have traditionally used something like that: binary code is shipped for a general mainframe architecture, and on first execution is specialized to the hardware / performance characteristics of the particular model within that architecture that you're running. Also allows for transparent upgrades, since if you migrate to a new model, the binary will re-specialize itself on the next execution, (ideally) taking advantage of whatever fancy new hardware you bought.
