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Comment by baybal2 | Hacker News Reader

To add to that, I recently heard that Intel is about to jump the Synopsys ship for Cadence.

I was completely dazzled thinking "what to they get from that?" until it hit me that only Cadence has 7nm TSMC and Samsung workflow ready.

This made me thinking, is Intel finally thinking about doing 7nm tapeouts at TSMC or Samsung?

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I remember reading that Intel was having TSMC run off the lowest end Altera FPGAs because Intel's fabs were just too expensive.

Other possibilities off the top of my head might be Cadence being able to do stuff that's now required for these smaller and using EUV lithography nodes, and/or a backup in case their "10nm" never makes it, and their "7nm" having problems or also failing. Embarrassment should be preferable to the worst case alternatives, and we have no reason to believe Intel will be able to regain its ability to move to smaller nodes.

> only Cadence has 7nm TSMC and Samsung workflow ready.

I think you're not right, unless I am missing something.

https://news.synopsys.com/2018-04-30-TSMC-Certifies-Synopsys...

https://news.synopsys.com/2018-06-22-Synopsys-Custom-Design-...

Well, nice to know that. Nevertheless, Cadence was first to get to 7nm, and is still ahead with never versions of 7nm processes like 7HPC.

To my knowledge, they are the only one who have just anything workable for EUV based processes.

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