I wouldn't say that invalidates their achievements though. It's not like they took a 20+ year old architecture, built it on 14nm to bump up clock speed and were done. Improving something existing still requires you to thoroughly understand the technology. There wouldn't really have been a point in starting completely from scratch (why not even reinvent electricity while you're at it), other than some additional street cred.

Interesting. Almost all leading-edge US chip designs have a piece of their pedigree I can trace from the engineers that worked on the Alpha in that Littleton, MA facility. Did Sunway hire their people or just copy their designs?

I think only the older Sunway (SW1600) chips use Alpha ISA, and not the design. The ones in the TaihuLight (SW26010) are not Alpha.

Similar to Loongson, which used the MIPS ISA, but a homegrown design.