I'm curious why it only runs at 180MHz on a Kintex-7. The Kintex-7 can do 32-bit additions at 400-500MHz, so it's odd to see an 8088 running at less than half that. The article mentions that removing the cycle accurate constraint would allow it to run faster, so perhaps that's why.
In theses solutions you're less interested in raw performance(you could go with one of their hybrid ARM-FPGA cores in that case) then keeping LUTs small so that the FPGA can use them for things that it's good at. Processors like these are kinda like the glue for larger parts.
