This has real strategic implications for India. So much modern military hardware depends on microprocessors. So what happens to India, if most of the chip fabs fall into the hands of hostile foreign powers? (Or, what happens if foreign powers who have or are near the chip fabs become hostile in the future?)
-- TFA
Older nodes, being well-understood mature technologies, can be manufactured domestically.
On the modern battlefield, one side having considerably more processing power than the other side might swing the strategic balance. This means more sophisticated missiles, ECM, battlefield coordination, targeting, etc... all on the side having access to the superior chip fab technology in wartime.
Now think about the chip fabs in Taiwan.
At least for space applications, it is common to use very old processes because of certification and, more importantly, processors that use larger processes are easier to radiation-harden. I don't know whether this also holds for military applications, but it seems at least plausible to me.
AFAIK, it is generally true. Military versions of the Intel x86 chips were generally one branding cycle behind. When hardened 486 chips were being used in F-16's 1st gen Pentiums were the norm for civilian use.
I imagine the design process requires a lot of high power computing, but when one gets down to implementing field devices, they typically aren't doing anything too high powered.
With that out of the way, yes, missiles now have a lot more computing power in them, even if they do more or less the same job- accuracy is generally the thing that improves here, as the physics models can be expanded to be more correct, as the number of sensors, and the way they are combined evolves, the end result is a better product. (And more Defence money, to boot!)
I've gotta say one more thing, though- a lot of the stuff in the military, and that goes to it, is built off now-ancient processes, because A) contracts, B) If it works, don't fix it, and C) standardization, so you may not see an FPGA in every missile, but they're getting there.
[1] this doesn't count as far as redundant parts are concerned, but it does give the engineers (and, by proxy, the customers) more trust in the outputs from the devices.
[2] It also costs way less space (and therefore money, to some degree, because mil-spec enclosures are expensive), to get two 1U servers than it does to have one vacuum-tube operated mainframe.
It seems to me that the interesting angle to this would be to avoid manufacture and instead spend your time on radical CPU designs on FPGA to be made from scratch later. No doubt that doesn't meet the needs of the folks in India.
Obviously, there is no such thing as "complete security" but you can try to secure what you can, that's why people concern themselves with what may seem like unlikely revenues of attack.
I mean depending on how critical your system is, it can really change how you operate. Get a virus on your computer? Some people use anti-virus, and when that says it "removed the virus" they're happy. Other people would only be happy with a complete OS reinstall from a fresh ISO made on a different machine as acceptable. Still other's would require new hardware, it's possible (and has been seen in the wild) to reflash the ROM of the motherboard, or potentially many other low-level chips through software, and to persist the virus through that. Likely no, just depends.
This is an important point.
In the future, polities who can't or won't fabricate their own chips will lose their independence to ones that do.