Our industry sources have confirmed that Intel tried to make a low power X86 part almost 13 years ago. The first project, codenamed Longbow, was launched in mid 1995.

Intel tried to pull off this project three times and the last attempt was made in 1998, but each time Andy Grove shut the project down. A chap called Ticky Thakkar was a big supporter of a project.

Longbow was supposed to be a low-power X86 CPU with a superpipeline Pentium P5-like design. Well, as Andy didn’t like it, they shut the project down three times.

Andy Grove was the CEO of Intel at that time and Ticky Thakkar is a key guy involved in the Silverthorne project who became a fellow almost ten years ago. It took Ticky thirteen years to pull it off.

It took Intel more than a decade to realize that this is the way to go while companies such as Texas Instrument understood this years ago and made a huge market presence with tiny miliwatt chips that you can use for mobile phones and similar devices.

Intel is years behind Texas Instrument (TI), but it is playing a strong catch-up game. It looks like thirteen years ago Intel only cared about the performance and actually this was true until they came up with the Core design.

Update: Ticky was a supporter of a project sorry for messing these facts up