The cost saving was more a marketing trick. Most of the savings were not from memory but from the reuse of the existing 8-bit peripherals without additional ha

The cost saving was more a marketing trick. Most of the savings were not from memory but from the reuse of the existing 8-bit peripherals without additional hardware and without software changes. On a 16-bit bus, you could connect an 8-bit peripheral to one of its halves, but then the internal registers that previously were at consecutive addresses now were spread at multiples of 2. When doing only 8-bit transfers, you could rewrite the software drivers to use the modified addresses. However you could not do 16-bit transfers, because the bytes were no longer in the same word. This could be fixed with additional buffers, decoders and registers, to convert 16-bit transfers into pairs of 8-bit transfers on the same bus half (like 8088 did internally), but that would increase the cost. Even if these compatibility problems were not too difficult to solve, most preferred to avoid them, in the quest for minimum cost.