VLIW at IBM Research

Very-Long Instruction Word (VLIW) architectures form the basis for an alternative way to organize processors. In contrast to the trend towards having hardware to perform complex decisions regarding scheduling the machine-level instructions in a program, VLIW architectures perform such scheduling at compilation time. This transfer of complexity from hardware to software (processor to compiler) leads to simpler, more efficient, and easier-to-design processors, while at the same time exploiting the versatility of software to handle the more difficult tasks.

There's a nice interactive DAISY Tutorial demo too that helps explain the technique.

From the Frequently Asked Questions About DAISY (October 12, 2000):

How similar is DAISY to Transmeta?

According to their white paper, Transmeta uses dynamic binary translation to convert x86 code into code for Transmeta's internal architecture. This is similar in concept to the current version of DAISY which converts PowerPC code into code for an underlying DAISY VLIW machine. DAISY was developed at IBM independently of Transmeta. The DAISY research project focuses less on low power and more on achieving instruction level parallelism in a server environment and on convergence of different architectures on a common microprocessor core. A more detailed comparison of the DAISY and Transmeta approaches will be possible after Transmeta publishes their techniques in more detail.