I don't recall Loongson having any major joint venture cooperations with foreign companies. Loongson has a fairly long history compared to other chip designers in China. The first Loongson chip started out as a project by the Chinese Academy of Science (CAS) in 2001 (the chips were also referred to as Godson back then). It wasn't until 2009-2010 that the first Loongson chips started going commercial. For comparison Zhaoxin (a joint venture with VIA technologies) was created in 2013.
The major difference between Loongson and other chip designers in China is the chip architecture. Loongson produces chips using the MIPS architecture. Zhaoxin produces chips using the x86 architecture. I am not going to go into the technical benefits and disadvantages between the two different architectures, but the IP licensing differences. A lot of the x86 licences and patents are controlled by Intel, AMD and VIA. This is why Zhaoxin having a joint venture with VIA is able to easily navigate through possible IP and patent issues. Loongson in contrast has its own MIPS license (licensing process took place from 2007-2011) and developed and patented its own micro-architecture to implement MIPS compatible CPUs.
MIPS Computer Systems Inc. was created/developed in Stanford in 1981. In 1992 Silicon Graphics Inc. acquired MIPS Computer Systems Inc. and renamed it to MIPS Technologies Inc. MIPS Technologies Inc was acquired by various American companies until 2018 when it was acquired by Wave Computing. Wave Computing entered into a MIPS license agreement with Prestige Century Investments (Hong Kong based investment firm in Samoa) in 2018. Prestige Century Investments transferred its MIPS-related license to CIP United in China during 2019. In 2020 Wave Computing filed for bankruptcy in the US. Essentially meaning CIP United controls all the licensing for new and existing MIPS processors in China.
So the upside for China is that it controls the licensing for the MIPS architecture. But why does Zhaoxin still want to do a joint venture with VIA to produce x86 chips? AMD and Intel have a several decades head start on designing and producing chips based on the x86 architecture. So that means a huge chunk of OS and software are developed specifically for the x86 architecture. A computer chip is useless without an OS and software! The last Western MIPS CPU was a 28nm process Warrior-M CPU in 2015. Who here has even heard or bought a Warrior-M CPU??? It's not an exaggerration to say that Loongson likely has the most advanced MIPS CPU in 2021. Loongson not only has to figure out how to design and get their MIPS chips fabricated, but it also need to encourage the development of an OS and software for its chips. This is why Loongson chips added hardware based x86 emulation to execute x86 code (performance will never be as good as just running the x86 code on an x86 processor to begin with though). Ideally Loongson would like everyone to run OS and software developed for the MIPS architecture, but reality is that the majority of consumers are using software designed to run on an x86 or ARM architecture.
