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by actionfromafar 760 days ago
That would be fact - AMD was the second source for the 8088. (Licensing IP from Intel.)
1 comments

Motorola 68000 also had second sourcing options, just like 8088 - but 8086 was released a year earlier and built up on well-known successful design of 8080, even if they weren't exactly compatible. It built confidence about Intel's ability to deliver, even when 8088 was released the same year as 68k, as it was just bus-narrowed cheaper version, not an entire architecture.
Which reminds me - the bus-narrowed version was important, because they then could use cheap and off the shelf 8-bit components for the rest of the chip set.
Both required a bus demultiplexer, but indeed 8088 was cheaper in a bunch of places (both 8086 and 8088 could run 8bit data transfers, though)