[gmueckl]

At least the journal reports I read at that time implied that much. He was one of the technical leads on this as far as I recall. So he would have had to get a very good knowledge of the Transmeta CPU and of the x86 instruction set for that task. I think it shows here.

[monocasa]

IIRC, he originally wrote Linux to be 386 specific and essientially to get hands on experience with all of the special features.

He was already one of the best minds of x86 who hadn't seen real internals of another chip, hence why Transmeta hired him in the first place.