Their older chips are indeed MIPS based, but the newer ones (including the ones this article is talking about) are using their own LoongArch ISA, which while has a few similarities to MIPS, is not the same.

Here’s some official LoongArch documentation in English and a very nice blog by WÁNG Xuěruì who is quite involved with the porting of quite a few large projects (the Linux kernel itself, Gentoo, LLVM, Rust, and Go) to LoongArch if you’re interested in reading up about it.

They’re quite solid chips for basic desktop/office use, and even some very light gaming if paired with a compatible graphics card in my testing. Hopefully Loongson can manage to make a dent in the x86(_64) monopoly in a decade or so :)

I’m not sure about other more “basic” things like artillery shells, small arms ammunition, etc. but you can pretty much assume that without China (specifically Taiwan and their semiconductors), they wouldn’t have any modern weapons that rely on computer guidance systems, weapons control systems, and other things of that nature.

I stumbled upon this neat video showing the internals of Javelin missile’s guidance system a while ago, and who could have guessed, basically every chip inside that thing is stamped with “Made in Taiwan”, even the ones made by “Texas” Instruments.

I’d assume this is the reason the current administration has been investing so heavily in bringing TSMC to the states (and failing), because they know they can’t keep up their occupation of Taiwan forever and it would be devastating for them to lose what’s essentially their only supply of semiconductors.