In 1984, Commodore International signed a deal to manufacture the 8088 for use in a licensed Dynalogic Hyperion clone, in a move that was regarded as signaling a major new direction for the company.

[10] The available CMOS version was outsourced to Oki Electronic Industry Co., Ltd.[11] When announced, the list price of the 8088 was US$124.80.

Combined with the IO/M and DT/R signals, the bus cycles can be decoded (it generally indicates when a write operation or an interrupt is in progress).

[16]: 5–98 Depending on the clock frequency, the number of memory wait states, as well as on the characteristics of the particular application program, the average performance for the Intel 8088 ranged approximately from 0.33 to 1 million instructions per second.

In short, an 8088 typically runs about half as fast as 8086 clocked at the same rate, because of the bus bottleneck (the only major difference).

A side effect of the 8088 design, with the slow bus and the small prefetch queue, is that the speed of code execution can be very dependent on instruction order.

For example, a repeated string operation or a shift by three or more will take long enough to allow time for the 4-byte prefetch queue to completely fill.

As some instructions, such as single-bit-position shifts and rotates, take literally 4 times as long to fetch as to execute,[c] the overall effect can be a slowdown by a factor of two or more.

If those code segments are the bodies of loops, the difference in execution time may be very noticeable on the human timescale.

In some cases, a sequence of logic and movement operations is faster than a conditional jump that skips over one or two instructions to achieve the same result.

Intel datasheets for the 8086 and 8088 advertised the dedicated multiply and divide instructions (MUL, IMUL, DIV, and IDIV), but they are very slow, on the order of 100–200 clock cycles each.

Many simple multiplications by small constants (besides powers of 2, for which shifts can be used) can be done much faster using dedicated short subroutines.

[18] Another factor was that the 8088 allowed the computer to be based on a modified 8085 design, as it could easily interface with most nMOS chips with 8-bit databuses.

This included ICs originally intended for support and peripheral functions around the 8085 and similar processors (not exclusively Intel's), which were already well known by many engineers, further reducing cost.