A series about Intel. Part One: The Fall

About the series:

To better defend our hypothesis that Intel Foundry will probably be spun-off once 18A ships in volume and becomes profitable (more on that in the follow-up articles), this series about the Santa Clara company will first examine the company’s execution in the last decade, including the infamous 10nm catastrophe and how it all started.

Acknowledgement:

This article and the following pieces wouldn’t have been possible without the numerous articles authored by:

_ Writers at anandtech.com including Anand Lal Shimpi, Ian Cutress, Ryan Smith, Andrei Frumusanu and others.

_ The very friendly Patrick Kennedy from servethehome.com

_ The legendary Charlie Demerjian from semiaccurate.com (some content not behind the paywall)

_ Michael Larabel from the highly recommended phoronix.com

_ David Schor from the very well-informed fuse.wikichip.org

Big thanks to them for making valuable information available to the public.

How it all started: 14nm Broadwell-Y stepping E0 from late 2014

It is a very well documented fact by now that the last few years have not been easy for Intel. Arguably, it all started around the year 2014, 10 years ago. Whatever happened from this point, it was mostly a management problem. Intel’s engineers didn’t become suddenly incompetent from one day to the next. Management however…

2014 was the year Intel was supposed to launch its 14nm process node. It did, but only in a contrived and dishonest way. And that’s how it all started. Broadwell CPUs, the first 14nm processors from Intel, were effectively launched late in 2014, but only in small volume, and only the Broadwell-Y variants were launched. These were very low power processors (4.5 W TDP), tailored for lightweight laptops. The number of SKUs launched was pretty small, too: as little as three. They all had the E0 stepping (a stepping is basically a revision of the design which mostly doesn’t impact functionality but can greatly improve yield and thus manufacturability). However at the start of 2015, Intel discontinued these three processors and replaced them with updated SKUs sporting a new F0 stepping , and complicit OEMs duly updated their laptops too. Basically, Intel played a dirty trick on everyone, most of all on their shareholders.

Why would the company do this? It would seem that that was all about upper management pay incentives. Part of the upper echelons’ compensation package would be tied to “performance”. Performance here being defined as the ability to launch a new generation of product by a fixed date (i.e. before year end xx). But, as the incentives were seemingly very poorly defined, it looks as though it didn’t really matter if the volume was extremely low and if the launch was mostly fake: all you had to do to get your end-of-year bonus was to “launch” the new generation before December 31^st of said year. A few months later, the real products with a new stepping enabling better yield and higher volume would finally launch.

Basically, the company appears to have cheated, with the complicity of a few laptop OEMs, so that upper management would get their performance bonus. Lies about process node readiness and real-world yield were spread around everywhere. It all started innocuously enough: by 2015, when real 14nm volume began to materialize in the supply chain, Intel was still clearly far ahead of the competition (TSMC and Samsung). All was well.

But bad habits took root. On top of everything else, management likely got used to not listening to the engineering side of the business. Why would they? In the end, the company’s engineers always ended up getting it right anyway, even if after a not-so-damaging delay, since the company was so dominant technology-wise at the time. In other words, complacency and poor management appear to have taken root at that point in time.

How it got way worse: the shameful ghost of Cannon Lake at the end of 2018

What Intel’s management did with the 14nm process node, it apparently tried to repeat with the 10nm process node: lie to everybody (shareholders, financial analysts, the press) about real world volume manufacturability, launch a fake SKU before year end to get their performance-tied bonus, and then count on the manufacturing side of the business to eventually get it right (even if that was many months later than originally envisioned), because ultimately, they always do, right?

Wrong. At 10nm, the company’s entire manufacturing roadmap essentially collapsed, with terrible consequences for everyone involved. In more detail, Intel launched a mostly fake 10nm SKU, the Core i3-8121U, just before the end of year 2018, with the same complicit Chinese OEM as last time. Note that this time there was only one SKU, and the integrated GPU was disabled (it wasn’t working). What is more, four years had passed since Broadwell’s launch, and that was twice the delay prescribed by the famous tick tock cadence. In other words, the situation was much worse than it was for the 14nm process node launch.

Cannon Lake never really existed as a product line. There were never any other Cannon Lake CPUs launched, and the product line was later killed. More precisely, it was “killed with fire”, as this commit shows (found via Phoronix).

Charlie Demerjian from semiaccurate.com had an excellent coverage of Intel's 10nm disaster at the time (see for example here, here, here, and here), even though what he wrote at the time probably seemed hard to believe for many people. How could Intel, the undisputed king of semiconductor manufacturing so far, fail so spectacularly? Part of the answer is probably because management got completely careless and complacent about manufacturing issues (see above).

Cannon Lake was the lowest point in Intel’s journey through 10nm hell: a single SKU, only partially working (the integrated GPU was disabled), in a line-up that was dead on arrival. Hard to see any reason for it to exist, except for upper management to get their end of year bonus. The ultimate shameful product.

Muddling through with 10nm Ice Lake: low volume and dubious profitability backed up by 14nm products

With Ice Lake Intel finally managed to launch a full line-up of 10nm CPUs, first for laptops, and then for servers. There were no 10nm Ice Lake desktop CPUs from the company, but more on that below. To better understand how Intel managed the consequences of the industrial catastrophe that was 10nm, we will have to distinguish between these three different categories of CPUs: laptop, server, and desktop, in that order. There is a common theme between Ice Lake for laptops (Mobile Ice Lake) and Ice Lake for servers (Ice Lake SP, for Scalable Processor): both line-ups coexisted with a concurrent range of 14nm products (Comet Lake for Mobile Ice Lake, and Cascade Lake SP for Ice Lake SP). This allowed the company to save face by launching real 10nm products, all the while preserving both its profits and its ability to ship real volume to its customers by continuing to rely heavily on 14nm products for a majority of its volume.

10nm for laptops: allowing the competition to catch up

Approximatively 8 months after Cannon Lake so-called launch, Intel finally managed to roll out the 10nm Mobile Ice Lake range of CPUs, in August 2019. At that point, it bested AMD’s offering of the time, codenamed Picasso. But that didn’t last long, as in May 2020 AMD launched Renoir, the successor to Picasso, and this line-up was clearly better that Mobile Ice Lake. Of course, judging the merits of different laptop platforms is way more complicated than this, as you have to take into account single-thread CPU performance, multi-thread CPU performance, GPU performance, features like video codec capabilities and connectivity, and efficiency in many different scenarios. What is more, everything ultimately depends on how well thought out and refined the OEM implementation of said platform actually is. And that certainly was a problem for AMD at the beginning of its comeback in the mobile market, as its laptop processors had traditionally been confined to low end products with lousy specs and unsatisfactory fit and finish.

Bu there is no denying that Picasso allowed AMD to best Intel’s Ice Lake in the most important metrics, and heralded the company’s comeback as a serious and credible contender at the high end of the laptop market. And this was all because Intel’s entire roadmap had basically exploded at 10nm, allowing its main competitor to stage a long, hard and overdue comeback.

Back to the matter at hand, Ice Lake wasn’t even the only mobile offering from Intel at that time. Most of its laptop products during that period were in fact 14nm CPUs codenamed Comet Lake. The company proceeded with this confusing mash-up (see this excellent article from Ian Cutress for more details) almost certainly because it simply could not afford to have all its laptop CPUs be from the 10nm Ice Lake range, as these were probably not profitable enough, especially compared to good old 14nm ones. In other words, Intel managed to launch a full 10nm mobile line-up with Ice Lake, but it still didn’t manage to launch an entirely profitable one. Which is just another way of saying: 10nm still wasn’t ready to succeed 14nm at that time, even for mobile chips that traditionally favor newer nodes.

The situation for servers: losing face against AMD’s Zen 2 and Zen 3 products

As for servers, the 10nm disaster at Intel and ensuing chaos allowed its arch-rival AMD to stage an even more incredible comeback than in the laptop domain. Arguably, this fantastic resurgence relied heavily on AMD’s Zen architecture intrinsic qualities, including its mind boggling 52% IPC increase from the previous generation (Zen first launched on the desktop in March 2017). Still, when it launched in August 2019 its second generation Zen CPUs for servers, codenamed Rome, AMD delivered a Knockout to its main competitor, as Patrick Kennedy from servethehome.com so brilliantly formulated at the time. This was also due to its very innovative architecture, which arguably heralded the start of the chiplet era. Back then, Intel only had its 14nm Cascade Lake SP available to compete. It didn’t take long for the company to adjust to the new reality by slashing prices by up to 60%. However, in typical Intel fashion, the company didn’t really slash the prices of its existing products. Instead, it refreshed its Cascade Lake SP line-up with mostly identical parts that had different names and much lower prices. This was the company’s typical behavior at that time: avoiding bad press at all costs, doing everything in its power to not spook shareholders, even if it involved misleading – some would say borderline dishonest – behavior.

But Intel’s journey through 10nm hell didn’t end there for server CPUs. The company didn’t manage to launch its 10nm Ice Lake SP line-up before AMD struck a second time with Milan, its third generation Zen product for servers, which launched in March 2021. What is worse, the first wave of Ice Lake SP CPUs – launched in April 2021 – seems to have existed partially just for show (at least for those that could easily be swapped for a 14nm equivalent in terms of core count), as this fascinating piece (again from Patrick Kennedy at servethehome.com) shows. Dated October 2021, this article basically explains that by that date, it was still pretty difficult to buy an Ice Lake based server with 28 cores or less from many big OEMs. All you could easily find at the time (6 months after the official Ice Lake SP launch date) was still only a 14nm Cascade Lake SP based system.

So not only did Intel lost all technical credibility versus AMD in the server world with vastly inferior products starting in mid-2019, but when it finally launched its 10nm server CPUs in Q2 2021, these were not shipped in real volume nor were they apparently as profitable as their in house 14nm counterparts (just like with Ice Lake for laptops). It is important to remember at this point that Intel’s 10nm process was originally supposed to launch in volume in 2016-2017. Add the obligatory two-years delay for a new process node to trickle down to server CPUs (which are bigger and harder to make), and this brings us to a 2018-2019 window for Intel to launch its 10nm server CPUs (if everything had gone well).

Since it is reasonable to consider that Ice Lake SP wasn’t a real 10nm server CPU line-up, as in really shippable in volume all the while maintaining profits, the real deal from Intel only came out in January 2023, in the form of the 10nm Sapphire Rapids (more on that in the next article in the series). From 2018-2019 to January 2023, that’s a four years delay for a real, profitable 10nm server CPUs range to be launched by Intel, compared to what was originally envisioned years before, had the company been able to maintain its two-to-three years process node rollout cadence. This delay is the sign of major industrial accident, happening in a very badly mismanaged company. But we will come back later to this point, looking at the financial side of the story. For now, let’s transition to…

The 10nm disaster on the desktop: 6 years for a part to appear!

When a new process node is launched, it generally brings more in terms of power usage reduction than higher frequency capabilities. This has been true for all new process nodes from the big three (Intel, TSMC, Samsung) since more than a decade at least. Intel’s 10nm process node was no exception. Since 10nm was so hard for Intel to get right, making a competitive, high frequency desktop 10nm part was even harder. Indeed, to grossly oversimplify, compared to laptop or server parts, desktop parts are all about high frequency. Hence the fact that Intel’s 10nm desktop parts took so long to appear. We won’t get into much details here, but it took until Alder Lake’s launch in November 2021 for a proper 10nm desktop part to appear. Knowing that the first Intel 14nm desktop SKUs launched in August 2015 in the form of Skylake, that’s more than six long years for a 10nm desktop part to appear, which is the equivalent of several eternities in the industry.

Still, contrary to what happened for laptops and for servers, this delay did not entirely prevent Intel to stay competitive in this particular market, at least not in terms of pure performance. However, by staying on 14nm, all the while keeping basically the same micro-architecture (going from Skylake to Comet Lake), increasing core count from 4 to 10, and increasing maximum 1-core frequency by 1GHz, Intel had to forgo all pretentions to stay competitive in terms of power efficiency, especially as rival AMD kept on rolling out ever more ambitious (and efficient) Zen-based desktop products.

More to the point, Intel’s previously described strategy of endlessly declining the same micro-architecture over and over finally hit a brick wall after Comet Lake, and it eventually had to do the once unthinkable in March 2021: port a micro-architecture designed for 10nm to the 14nm node. This was an extremely spectacular sign that even as late as Q1 2021, its 10nm process node still wasn’t mature enough to allow for the implementation of a very high frequency desktop part.

Consequence #1: lost competitiveness at the end of the tunnel

Just like good things, all bad things come to an end, including Intel’s journey through 10nm hell. After the relative embarrassment that was Ice Lake, the company finally managed to come up with a version of its 10nm technology that was profitable enough to replace the entirety of its previous 14nm line-ups. This almost certainly involved some kind of rework of the physical implementation of said 10nm process node, but apart from the fact that there is no public information on the matter, these technical details are frankly beyond the scope of this article. These new products launched in a staggered way, as is usual: Tiger Lake (for laptops) launched in September 2020; Alder Lake (for desktops) in November 2021; and finally Sapphire Rapids (for servers) in January 2023.

We will further examine Alder Lake, Sapphire Rapids, Raptor Lake and Meteor Lake (both successors to Alder Lake) in the next article of the series, which explores Intel’s more recent past. However, let’s just say for now that after all these trials and tribulations, in Q1 2024, Intel still isn’t competitive versus AMD in servers (and hasn’t been since Q3 2019 and the launch of AMD’s Rome). As for laptops, the Santa Clara company is in very clear danger of losing mind share and market share to AMD after a clearly disappointing Meteor Lake. And finally, Intel could end up losing badly to Zen5 based products on the desktop knowing that it probably won’t be able to launch Arrow Lake before AMD strikes first with Granite Ridge.

We will come back to all these shenanigans in the next articles of the series, but for now it can be clearly concluded that all the delays incurred by Intel during its 10nm catastrophe have cost it dearly in terms of competitiveness, with consequences still playing out to this day, and probably well into 2025, too

Consequences #2 & #3: 14nm shortages and Intel Foundry launch cancelled

The idea of Intel as a third-party foundry in anything but new. As this 2014 presentation from Intel shows, it is, in fact, more than ten years old. The reasoning – which was already valid a decade ago – is as follows: semiconductor manufacturing facilities are incredibly expensive, and to keep them profitable you need to maintain a high utilization rate. This is pretty hard to do if said facilities serve only a single company, even one as big and diversified as Intel was ten years ago. Indeed, the business of chip making is no stranger to up and down cycles, and this has always been the case. When you are the sole owner and operator of crazily expensive semiconductor manufacturing facilities, your profitability is at the mercy of any downturn your internal chip-making business may encounter. If, however, you diversify the manufacturing side of your business to serve third party customers, then you gain a hedge against any deterioration your own chip-making may stumble upon.

When Intel’s 10nm roadmap crashed and burned, so did its foundry plans: the new 10nm node was very late, with low volume and disappointing performance. Not ideal to entice new customers. Even worse: as real and truly profitable 10nm capacity basically materialized with an approximatively five years delay (from a supposed launch in 2016 to a real-world launch around 2021), Intel had no choice but to continue to rely on good old 14nm for that period. The problem was that this was never the original plan, and so capacity for 14nm became extremely scarce. It didn't help, of course, that demand for datacenter CPUs was booming at the time, and that Intel still had most of that market all for itself during that period (that remained the case even after AMD’s Rome launch in Q3 2019, more on that below). Hence the crushing shortages of 14nm capacity at the time. So, during that period the company had no real 10nm capacity whatsoever, and a terrible shortage of 14nm capacity. Intel had thus no other choice than to cancel the launch of its foundry services.

This, of course, was never officially announced. News of Intel Custom Foundry (as it was called at the time) simply ceased to appear. However, many big names in the industry got badly burned in the process, notably Cisco and LG.

Consequence #4: The IP pipeline got stalled

Furthermore, the consequences for Intel didn’t stop there. When its manufacturing roadmap was rendered essentially invalid by the 10nm disaster, its architectural roadmap also became very severely impacted. Indeed, the company hadn’t planned on its manufacturing wing to essentially stall for more than four years. And as all of the new IP that Intel had planned to launch starting in 2016 was supposed to be implemented in 10nm, all said IP’s launch was consequently badly delayed. The most spectacular example of this delay is Intel’s PCIe gen 4 IP, which came out very late, especially on servers where it was most strategically needed: there was a 7 quarters delay between AMD’s rollout of PCIe gen 4 with Rome and Intel’s deployment of the same IP in servers with Ice Lake SP. Again, seven quarters is almost the equivalent a generation’s entire lifespan. This kind of delay has a big impact on competitiveness, and shows how the catastrophe at 10nm had compounding effects for Intel, with manufacturing difficulties leading to microarchitectural delays, worsening an already bad situation.

The inescapable parallel with the Boeing Company

Before we reach the conclusion of part one, there is one last very interesting angle to examine regarding Intel’s 10nm disaster, and that’s the inescapable parallel with the Boeing Company. Indeed, here are two (former) icons of American manufacturing excellence, who have badly lost their ways because of management gone astray. Obviously, the comparison only goes so far, but there are striking similarities.

The similarities first: “icons of American manufacturing excellence” isn’t overplaying it. Up until the 10nm era, Intel was the undisputed king of semiconductor manufacturing, having an approximatively two years lead over its main competitors in that arena (Samsung and TSMC). The peak of this dominance was reached when Intel introduced FinFET at 22nm, when everyone else was still implementing planar designs (with disappointing results). During its long history, Intel has always cultivated excellence as a company-wide ethos. The same can basically be said of Boeing: when passengers put their lives into your hands, you don’t normally fool around. The company has long had a reputation for engineering excellence, and its historical role in the US industrial landscape earned it a special place in the USA’s self-image.

And now for the bad part. It would seem that just like Intel, Boeing mostly lost its ways because of managements issues. In both cases, management apparently became more interested in short term profits rather than investing in the long run to maintain its engineering excellence as an advantage over the competition. Obviously, the problematic at hand is way more complicated than that, as these are two very big companies, and properly steering them in a complex and moving strategic environment is incredibly difficult. Besides, let’s not forget that insight is 20/20. However, in both cases, it seems pretty obvious that management lost its way by neglecting the manufacturing side of the business, and letting the culture of engineering excellence slowly wither away, all in the name of the single-minded pursuit of short-term profits.

That being said, there are also important differences between the two companies. When Intel’s manufacturing roadmap crashed and burned at 10nm, it still managed to generate record profits at the time, with annual net income of around $20B to $21B in the four years from 2018 to 2021 (the previous record was $13B; more on that discrepancy between industrial catastrophe and record profits below). The same cannot be said of Boeing, which recorded a cumulated $21B negative net income in the three years from 2020 to 2022 (even though Covid certainly played a part). And contrary to Intel’s board, Boeing’s board has only recently – and grudgingly – accepted the fact that management needed a radical change at the top, and said change won’t be implemented before the end of year 2024. Please note that the start of the Gelsinger era for Intel, its new CEO, will be examined in the next articles in this series. Two other big differences between Boeing and Intel are that, contrary to Boeing’s, Intel’s customers don’t directly put their lives in the company’s hands, and that, somewhat tangentially, the failures at Boeing can also be explained by the failures of its public regulator, the FAA.

Profits, market share and the inertia of it all

Before we conclude this part, we must talk about the elephant in the room: the record profits that Intel managed to generate (and the still very high market share that it managed to maintain) right in the middle of what is being called an industrial catastrophe in these pages. Why make such a big deal of a so-called disaster at 10nm if the company managed to earn so much money right in the middle of it? There are several reasons for this.

First, semiconductor design and manufacturing is a high inertia industry.

It takes years to finalize and validate a design, and many more quarters to be able to finally ship in volume a profitable product. And that’s assuming everything goes according to plan. Any problem with the design incurs a two to three months delay, and things can get out of hand pretty fast. So, there is a pretty big delay between the time everything starts to go wrong and the time it begins to show in the financial results. All the analysts and pundits who stated that Intel couldn’t possibly be in such a big trouble since it made so much money at the time (2018-2021) simply misunderstood the nature of this industry. This is indeed a very high inertia industry, and it takes a lot of time for deep-rooted and ugly problems to finally show up in the financial results, especially for a company as huge, diverse and dominant as Intel was until recently.

Second, server CPUs buyers are notoriously conservative.

After the Bulldozer catastrophe at AMD in 2011 (which we won’t rehash here), AMD essentially abandoned the server CPU market, allowing Intel’s market share for server CPUs to skyrocket to more than 95% in the following years and to stay there for very long. And even though starting from mid-2019 AMD had a clearly superior product, it took many years for its market share to slowly take off from zero and reach the 10 percent mark, and then 20 percent mark. We should also take into account here that even with TSMC’s flexibility backing them up, AMD simply didn’t have the financial and technical capabilities to increase its production a hundredfold from one quarter to the next. But back to the matter at hand, even with a clearly superior product, it took many years for AMD to convince enterprise server CPU buyers to finally switch from Intel, because buying Intel had simply become the norm. One interesting thing to note here is that cloud server CPU buyers seem less conservative than their enterprise peers, and were broadly the first to initiate the switch from Intel to AMD.

Third, 14nm saved the day for Intel.

Since it managed to maintain a high (but declining) market share throughout all those years of trouble (2018-2021), Intel was able to extract maximum profits from its trusty and plentiful 14nm process node, which at that time became probably relatively cheap (having been amortized many times over since its launch and ramp), and was still at least somewhat competitive in the 2018-2019 years, especially for laptops and desktops. Indeed, TSMC’s 7nm process node, which heralded the end of Intel’s undisputed manufacturing dominance, only started to appear in this period: Apple A12, launched in September 2018, and AMD’s 3000 series Ryzen desktop products and second gen Epyc server products, launched in the summer of 2019, were all based on TSMC’s 7nm process node. So, for a very long time Intel managed to rely on its old but trusty 14nm process node to achieve real volume and profits, especially as demand for server CPUs skyrocket at that time (see above the part about consequences #2 and #3).

Fourth, it took a long time for Intel’s arch-rival AMD to finally catch-up

After the disastrous launch of its Bulldozer derived line of architectures in 2011, AMD went through a near-death experience in the following years, with its server CPU market share cratering to zero, its laptop CPUs being confined to cheap and crappy models, and its desktop CPUs being simply not competitive at the high end. To the surprise of absolutely no one in the industry, it took many years for AMD to recover and to convince enterprise server CPU buyers and laptop OEMs that its new Zen based platforms were worth their while. (This is of course also a testament to the incredible success of Intel in the 2006-2018 period, when buying Intel was just the obvious thing to do for so many in the market). In any case, after its near-death experience, AMD had become a very tiny company with very limited resources, and they had no choice but to start very small and scale-up very gradually from there. Hence the Zen1 generation comprised basically only 2 dies, one 8 cores die for high end desktops and servers (scaling up to 32 cores per package in servers) and one APU die for laptops and low-end desktops. The later Zen 4 generation however comprises 7 dies in total (2 APU dies with Phoenix and Phoenix small, 2 compute dies (one 8 cores Zen4 die and one 16 cores Zen4c die), 2 IOD dies (one for desktops and one for servers), and one 3D cache die for products with stacked L3 cache). This increase in the number of different designs being churned out per generation is the unmistakable sign of a recovering company, slowly but surely reclaiming the capability to compete in all segments of the market. In any case, Intel benefited greatly from the sorry state of its arch rival at the dawn of the Zen era, and that partly explains why Intel managed to make so much money all the while experiencing what can only be described as a very serious industrial accident, if not an outright catastrophe.

Conclusion: The 10nm catastrophe knocked Intel off its pedestal and has endangered its future

Obviously, this is an overly long introduction to our later arguments that Intel will probably spin-off its foundries once 18A ships in volume and becomes profitable (and if not at 18A, maybe at 14A?). However, the idea here was to properly place everything in its context, and to explain how the 10nm crisis at Intel came to be and what the consequences were.

The 10nm disaster at Intel is one for the history books, and it will be very interesting indeed to see if in the coming years some proper investigative journalists and/or technical experts manage to get some insider’s testimony on how the road to Hell was effectively built at Intel under the leadership of Krzanich (CEO from 2013 to 2018). In any case, this story (“the fall”) is also that of a company that forgot its engineering excellence roots to chase short term profits at the expense of long-term competitiveness, and that is also saying something about American 21^st century capitalism, and its obsession with shareholder value and PR strategies at the expense of the important stuff like building good products. In any case, this industrial catastrophe will have long-lasting repercussions for the company well into 2025, and has already had very big consequences on the leading-edge semiconductor manufacturing industry, cementing TSMC’s rise as the go-to leading edge foundry, with all the geopolitical trappings that that entails.

We are however far from finished, and in part two (“Getting out of the hole”), we will examine Intel’s IDM 2.0 and 5Y4N strategies and the start of the Gelsinger era. Also, notwithstanding the manufacturing side of the business, Intel began to experience a lot of difficulties churning out competitive designs on time (11 steppings for Sapphire Rapids!), and made other dubious deign choices (the over-designed and over-complicated Ponte Vecchio and Meteor Lake come to mind as examples). Stay tuned for the next part!