Recently, ARM Holdings (ARM) advanced a notion that the surging AI market needs a particular kind of processor in order to run at its best. Chip stock Intel (INTC) heard this notion, and laughed quietly in Clearwater Forest, because Intel was apparently already there. This revelation seized investors squarely by the imagination and sent shares blasting up nearly 7% in Tuesday afternoon’s trading.
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Basically, ARM executive vice president of cloud AI Mohamed Awad took the stage at the Arm Everywhere event, and detailed that artificial intelligence (AI) agents need a very specific kind of processor. Said processor was not the x86, Awad made clear, noting that “boost modes” were not sustainable. The processors of AI future needed to do more with less die area and offer better power consumption.
The problem with that, though, is that Intel already has a line of chips that works in much the same way Awad said they needed to work. The Clearwater Forest line boasts 288 stripped-down cores, uses very little in the way of SIMD extensions, and boasts 12 channels of DDR5 memory. This gives it the density, power effectiveness, and core count to deliver exactly what ARM is trying to deliver now. Throw in the Sierra Forest and Granite Rapids Xeons with their extra P-cores, and Intel has quite a bit of processor power ready to go on this front already.
Moving to GitHub
Meanwhile, Intel engineers recently did a favor to those involved in data center performance measurements. Specifically, the engineers put out a large-scale repository of knowledge on the subject on the GitHub platform. This opens up a range of new tools, from optimization recipes to recommendations about system configurations all in one handy package.
Better yet, the data in question—kept in a place known as Optimization Zone—is available at no charge since it is open source. Intel built this repository from customer feedback, reports note, and thus compiled the results of all that feedback into a handy tool that virtually anyone could access and put to work themselves.
Is Intel a Buy, Hold or Sell?
Turning to Wall Street, analysts have a Hold consensus rating on INTC stock based on seven Buys, 22 Holds and four Sells assigned in the past three months, as indicated by the graphic below. After a 86.8% rally in its share price over the past year, the average INTC price target of $47.97 per share implies 9.13% upside potential.
