Chip stock Intel (INTC) brought out a welcome roadmap that suggests one of its new models will include support for a key system. It also puts to bed some potentially dangerous rumors. Despite this, Intel still saw a major drop in its share price as shareholders digested the news. Intel shares dropped nearly 6% in Thursday afternoon’s trading.
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Intel rolled out a new manual, titled the “Architecture Instruction Set Extensions and Future Features” manual, the 60th such manual printed. And it revealed a point that had worried some outside viewers for some time: that only AMD (AMD) would offer chips with 512-bit vector acceleration. That was not the case, as Intel’s new manual showed the good news: Nova Lake would have AVX-512 and AVX10.2, offering support for both Advanced Vector Extensions (AVX) and Advanced Performance Extensions (APX).
This revelation also filled in another blank. Both the Coyote Cove P-cores and the Arctic Wolf E-cores will have advanced vector processing. This may ultimately give Intel a bit of an advantage going forward, something it sorely needs as it tries to win back lost market share.
Concerns in the Numbers
Meanwhile, some are going back over Intel’s recent earnings report and coming out with some unexpected potential problems ahead. One point seldom raised addresses “share dilution,” which happens when a company issues a large number of new shares. Normally, this matters less than you might think, because the dilution is small. But Intel increased its total number of shares by 11%, which makes share dilution a more serious problem.
Then, so-called “unusual items” had an oddly outsized impact on Intel’s bottom line, with Intel gaining $3.9 billion from these. And then, there was the matter of earnings per share. With share dilution running unusually high, that impacts the total amount of earnings per share, and offers what some consider a better indicator of Intel’s overall performance.
Is Intel a Buy, Hold or Sell?
Turning to Wall Street, analysts have a Hold consensus rating on INTC stock based on three Buys, 24 Holds and six Sells assigned in the past three months, as indicated by the graphic below. After a 51.38% rally in its share price over the past year, the average INTC price target of $35.44 per share implies 0.31% downside risk.
