It's well known that the 80186/80188/V40/V50 tended to be unpopular choices for PC clones because they offered "wrong" peripherals. Much of the value of integration is lost if you have to disable half the peripherals and wire in more compatible parts.
Of course, when the parts were designed, it's doubtful that anyone realized that a slapdash project out of Boca Raton was going to conquer most of desktop computing. Sure! Put in a GOOD DMA controller, it's not like everyone's going to use an 8237 and tape on the other four bits of the address!
But there was a good 5-year window between when the IBM clone market was legitimized (Compaq and Phoenix BIOS) and the death of XT-class machines as a mainstream commercial product. It seems like this would have been enough time to shuffle around some existing design components and bring out "186, but more IBM-compatible." It seems like an obvious product when your target market is either bargain-price clones, or early laptops where a "system-on-chip" design would save space and design complexity.
Did it exist and I missed it? Was the second-source ecosystem at the time not really capable of design rework, or contractually limited, so they could really only do naive-copy 186 parts?
Of course, when the parts were designed, it's doubtful that anyone realized that a slapdash project out of Boca Raton was going to conquer most of desktop computing. Sure! Put in a GOOD DMA controller, it's not like everyone's going to use an 8237 and tape on the other four bits of the address!
But there was a good 5-year window between when the IBM clone market was legitimized (Compaq and Phoenix BIOS) and the death of XT-class machines as a mainstream commercial product. It seems like this would have been enough time to shuffle around some existing design components and bring out "186, but more IBM-compatible." It seems like an obvious product when your target market is either bargain-price clones, or early laptops where a "system-on-chip" design would save space and design complexity.
Did it exist and I missed it? Was the second-source ecosystem at the time not really capable of design rework, or contractually limited, so they could really only do naive-copy 186 parts?