It was a big day for chip stock Intel (INTC) and partnerships, as news emerged about two of them. Not only did Intel get together with Exostellar to produce better and faster advancements in “enterprise-grade artificial intelligence (AI),” it also set up a new arrangement with Nokia (NOK). The combined results proved palatable to shareholders, and they sent shares up nearly 3% in Tuesday afternoon’s trading.
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The Exostellar partnership, reports note, will be comparatively simple but should prove fairly effective. Intel will bring its Gaudi AI accelerators to Exostellar’s Kubernetes-Native AI Orchestration, Multi-Cluster Operator systems to produce a powerful new whole. The end result is a system that will improve utilization, offer better control for systems access, and ultimately, improve return on investment by making a more cost-effective system that still delivers results.
With the Gaudi 3 accelerators in place, the systems can be trained much more rapidly, and produce greater inference ability. That means faster time-to-market, reports note, and better performance once it gets there. That is a combination that should prove hard to pass up, and a winner for both Exostellar and Intel, whose hardware made it happen.
A Place at the 5G Table
Intel also managed to win a role with Nokia, who is working on new applications for 5G systems. Intel will be supplying Nokia with Xeon 6 processors, which should, in turn, mean that Nokia’s applications will consume about 60% less power in their use. Further, server footprints will be reduced by 60% as well, and overall performance is expected to nearly triple, hitting 150% of previous levels. With a set of numbers like that to draw on, it is little wonder that Nokia is maintaining its already long-standing partnership with Intel.
Intel Wireline and Core Network Division general manager and vice president Alexander Quach noted, “The combination of Intel Xeon 6 E-core processors – engineered for power-efficient, high-density compute – and Intel Infrastructure Power Manager, which delivers stable run-time power savings, provides a robust foundation for the most energy-efficient 5G core networks.”
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 four Sells assigned in the past three months, as indicated by the graphic below. After a 27.9% loss in its share price over the past year, the average INTC price target of $21.30 per share implies 7.43% downside risk.
