[1] The markets targeted were consumer electronics, office automation, and communications applications, including Nintendo game consoles.

SandCraft was named as such because sand represented silicon, the critical substrate in microprocessors, and craft to denote a design house.

Norman Yeung founded SandCraft, along with Mayank Gupta as chief architect in 1996.

Microprocessors with Floating point units were designed verified and contracted out to Asian manufacturing based on MIPS IV, with 64 bit instruction sets, and a later processor called SR71000, which was at the time the world's highest performance MIPS processor.

[2] They incorporated superscalar, multi-staged pipeline design,[2] and big/little endian support modes.