Most evidence suggests Transmeta is inventing a new kind of microprocessor so fast that it'll make a Pentium III feel like an abacus soaked in Jell-O. The chip, it's rumored, is built around a wholly new architecture, supposedly fast enough to run software emulating a standard PC's Intel x86 chip faster than any x86 chip could run itself. John Dvorak, a respected columnist for PC Magazine, stated confidently in February that the chip would be a "generic processor engine" that can run code for any kind of microprocessor -- Pentium, PowerPC, SPARC, you name it -- and translate it on the fly to its own native instruction set.