Mixed News Gives Intel Stock (NASDAQ:INTC) Little Help

Today proved to be a mixed bag as far as chip stock Intel (INTC) was concerned. But the order of the day looked to be “profit taking” as some good news and some bad news hit Intel shares like a bus. In fact, Intel shares were down over 7% Wednesday afternoon’s trading, giving back most of the gains it picked up yesterday.

The good news was pretty good news indeed. Intel managed to land the top slot at Imperial College London, where it is working on building a new supercomputer known as the HX2. While Imperial College will be turning to Lenovo for the servers, it will be packing Intel Xeon 6 processors running performance cores at its root.

The move to tap Intel for this development, reports note, should produce improvements in performance for the entire system. Since this system will have a hand in both artificial intelligence (AI) development and high performance computing (HPC), Intel stands to gain significant credibility in the field since its processors are powering the systems that help make these advances happen. And, with a water-cooled Lenovo Neptune cooling system to help keep it all running, the system will work with 40% less power and a substantial reduction in need for air conditioning.

But Then the Bad News Hit

It was not all future glory for Intel, as reports noted that Nvidia (NVDA), one of Intel’s biggest rivals, managed to take Intel out of the running in terms of single-threaded performance. This time around, the Nvidia NTX mobile system-on-a-chip (SoC) system took the honors from Intel, and delivered surprising power against even Intel’s 285HX.

Reports noted that the Nvidia NTX, when running on Geekbench benchmarking stats, gave it a score of 3,096 in single-core operations, and 18,837 in multi-core. This puts it slightly ahead of Intel in single-core, where Intel had 3,078, but not ahead in multi-core, where Intel came out with 22,104. In fact, some reports even suggest that Nvidia may have had a secret advantage in testing: Nvidia was reportedly running on Linux, while Intel was running Windows. That means there was a lot more power being pulled for Intel, which put it at a disadvantage in the benchmark testing, reports noted.

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 28.22% loss in its share price over the past year, the average INTC price target of $21.30 per share implies 4.21% upside potential.

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