[Bruce Abbott]

Originally Posted by Gorf

And payed for a license they never used ... afaik Commodore never produces any 8088.

I wonder how this came about ... did CSG run into problems making a 8088? Did management not ask CSG if this is something they could do beforehand?

The 8088 clone that wasn’t

In 1984, Commodore International licensed to the rights to manufacture 8088 CPUs. Commodore’s subsidiary, MOS Technology, had two chip fabrication plants at the time, and the speculation was they were going to enter the PC clone market and manufacture the chips themselves to allow them to meet a lower price point. While Commodore did go on to release a number of products using 8088 CPUs, as far as I know, they never used any self-made 8088 CPUs in any of their products. Every 8088-based Commodore product I have seen, whether it was a PC or a bridgeboard for an Amiga, used a Siemens 8088.

There were probably two reasons for this. Commodore did not have state of the art manufacturing capabilities, so they weren’t getting the number of chips per wafer that most other manufacturers were getting by 1984. This meant they couldn’t produce as many chips as other companies could, and it meant the chips they produced cost more... It’s also possible it cost them more to make an 8088 than it cost to just buy an 8088 from Siemens...

This makes sense. They probably got an excellent deal from Siemens, who were the largest second-source manufacturer of the 8088.