Looking at the 8008 wiki if the quotes are to be believed they were actually scared of performance. Believing that they would scare off customers buying intel m

Looking at the 8008 wiki if the quotes are to be believed they were actually scared of performance. Believing that they would scare off customers buying intel memory (their main business at the time apparently) for their own in house processors. So it seems very deliberate. That said the 8008 was primarily intended for terminals where performance really wasn't a concern. But that didn't stop people from making proper mini-computers from it.