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Introduction

This report is the second installment in the Crusoe Exposed series. It describes in detail the instruction set, binary encodings, functional unit specifics and more for the Transmeta TM5xxx microprocessors. Source code for a full disassembler and analysis toolset is provided. The first part can be found here.

Based on the response to the first report, I have decided to release substantially more details of my reverse engineering effort here. Fortunately, high level technical people at Transmeta have indicated that they have no legal intent to prevent the release of this information, but obviously cannot confirm nor deny its accuracy.

This is not the final report in this series, however hopefully the information provided here will be enough for other interested parties with more time on their hands to carry on my research into the dynamic behavior of CMS and the TM5xxx architecture while running x86 code.

As with all reports in this series, absolutely no proprietary trade secrets were used in this research. All the information presented here is strictly the result of clean room reverse engineering

This report is organized into three main sections. The first focuses on describing the TM5xxx architecture and microarchitecture, and the second is primarily observations, notes and critical analysis of Transmeta’s work in the field of binary translation and dynamic optimization. The last section is the appendix, which includes source code for disassembling and analyzing CMS memory images, plus opcode maps, statistics and more.

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