Not accurate. The fact that other manufacturers were allowed to build 8088 processors was certainly a supply agreement with IBM. The reason the IBM PC was so successful was pretty simple. They were IBM. They were the absolute monolith of business data processing. Putting the IBM name on one of these newfangled small computers signaled the business world that these were now serious machines. They didn't take the likes of Apple, Texas Instruments, Commodore, Amiga (for crying out loud) seriously. And do not think, even for a second, that business did not drive the personal computing revolution. Consumer PCs were nothing at the time and really didn't start to gain enough buyers for another decade and a half to be thought of seriously. It doesn't matter what you think of those other companies or how their technologies stacked up. It only mattered what General Motors, or Coca-Cola, or Sears thought. And they thought IBM. And they thought IBM enough to make the typewriter extinct in less than a decade.
Then the clone wars began. IBM being IBM thought, after the first sales figures came in, that maybe these little things will sell. And if only we can get those suckers to pay several thousand dollars a copy.... yeah. Apple tried to make a play as well, introducing the Apple Lisa to get in on the action with a huge buy of slick advertising. THAT sucker, as depicted in the TV ad, cost $14,000. If you're going to make the typewriter extinct in less than a decade you simply can't pay that much. It took Phoenix technologies six months to make an absolutely, positively, willtotallystandupincourt copy of the IBM BIOS and, remember, that was the ONLY intellectual property that IBM owned. Both IBM and Apple priced themselves out of the market early.
This ridiculous AMD fanboi idea that AMD was there leading the way for cheaper gaming PC's back in the 80's is ridiculously stupid. They were quite happy to ride Intel's coattails and rake in the $$ and, literally no one even knew who they were other than they owned a fab that could make the 8088.
Because they believed, (we don't know, there was never any legal challenge), that because the chip didn't include the original x86 instruction set, it would finally end the technology sharing agreement from the 80's. They could make 64 bit a clean break. When AMD added AMD64 to those same chips, they actually couldn't stop Intel from using it, the agreements went both ways. So, we all use AMD64 today no matter what brand we buy.
By the way, this is absolutely, hilariously similar to what IBM tried to do as well. They did design a new bus for the PS2. It was even objectively superior to the original and totally owned by IBM (they would even license it to other manufacturers.) But by then the clone makers had enough clout to design their own, close enough, bus (EISA). Thus IBM lost the opportunity to gain a royalty on every PC made (like Microsoft effectively had) forever and sold their PC business to Lenovo.
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