Transmeta today launched the most important product in the company's brief history, a powerful, yet energy-efficient processor the company hopes will take root in the growing market for servers, PCs, and handheld devices that deliver faster performance but go easy on batteries and other power sources.

Transmeta's Efficeon can run RISC-based apps or translate x86 code. Built using 130-nanometer technology, Efficeon can process eight instructions per clock tick--twice that of its Crusoe TM5800 predecessor--and features a 1-Mbyte cache size, an increase over Crusoe's 512-Kbyte cache. Efficeon can also run at a speed of 1.1 GHz while drawing 7 watts of electricity.

Read more: Information Week.

Coincidentally enough, VIA also announced today a new "Eden" branded CPU which they tout as the "World's Smallest & Lowest Power Native x86 Processor".