Much of the news at chip stock Intel (INTC) has been focused on CEO Lip-Bu Tan lately. But today, we got reports of the Lunar Lake processor line, and the kind of impact it could have on gaming use cases. Considering how many PCs get sold as gaming devices, this could be a welcome shot of news for Intel indeed. And investors seemed happy, giving Intel stock just over a 1.5% boost in Thursday afternoon’s trading.
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The whole thing started from coverage of the MSI Claw 8 AI+ A2VM, a serious entrant in the handheld gaming stakes that also serves as the only handheld gaming platform to turn to the Intel Core Ultra 7 258V processor. The most interesting part about that coverage was that, once the system is changed from using PL1 to PL2 settings, performance increases, and increases substantially at that.
In fact, the report noted that once the settings were adjusted, the system could actually deliver performance that is up to 30% better. Intel originally noted that adjusting those settings could result in a 10% increase in performance. But further adjustments saw even better performance upgrades, which could mean very good news for Intel if it can better harness, and market, those upgrades.
The Consequences of Trade Secret Theft
Perhaps even better for Intel, the saga of an engineer who left the company with a passel of trade secrets hoping to land a new job at Microsoft (MSFT) has been sentenced in the criminal case against him. Former Intel employee Varun Gupta was sentenced to two years’ probation and expected to pay fines of $34,472 for “…pilfering thousands of files…” that paved the way for a move to Microsoft. Reports noted that prosecutors wanted jail time for Gupta, but the court ultimately believed that Gupta had suffered enough from damage to his own reputation.
The files were, reports noted, highly useful to Microsoft in price negotiations, as Gupta had been a product marketing engineer at Intel for fully 10 years before attempting to jump ship.
Is Intel a Buy, Hold or Sell?
Turning to Wall Street, analysts have a Hold consensus rating on INTC stock based on one Buy, 26 Holds and three Sells assigned in the past three months, as indicated by the graphic below. After a 7.39% rally in its share price over the past year, the average INTC price target of $22.24 per share implies 2.16% downside risk.
