>>28
The Chinese probably learned about MIPS from Western CS textbooks. It's cheap to manufacture and relatively generic-looking compared to ARM, so they can more easily sneak out of buying licenses. A lot of their mid-range and high-end media players use unlicensed MIPS SoCs made by various short-lived companies with obscure names. (The low end is primarily 8051, Z80, and 6502.)
Name three companies that specialize in developing firmware for non-x86 platforms
There are
many, many more than BIOS vendors.
The reason why BIOS vendors have not proliferated is because there isn't that much demand for anything other than already provided.
Getting every weird little dinglet on the board to talk in 1MB of address space is where x86 comes apart at the seams.
BIOSes have their init code running in flat real mode ever since the 386. Coreboot wasn't the first to do it.