> LoongArch is now a fully legitimate, upstreamed ISA—with mainline Linux, Debian, and Rust support—ensuring it will be maintainable and usable at scale, but its momentum is institutional and domestic rather than market-driven: it exists to guarantee China a sovereign, unblockable CPU stack on a short timeline, not to attract global vendors, startups, or cloud ecosystems. In contrast, RISC-V is accumulating multi-vendor, cross-border adoption and economic gravity that define a global ISA; LoongArch’s success criteria are different, narrower, and largely already met.

Loongson started with MIPS CPUs but current CPUs are not MIPS-compatible. LoongArch, while being very similar to MIPS, uses a different encoding. And some other details have changed. Better to say, MIPS-inspired.