3 days ago
'Summer Heat' Proves Raptor Lake Killer, Intel Stock (NASDAQ:INTC) Gains Regardless
While indeed, the heat this summer has been rough in some places—perhaps more so than in others—there is one place that summer heat probably should not be such an issue: chip stock Intel's (INTC) product line. But a Firefox engineer is sounding a wildly unexpected warning, one that Intel shareholders do not seem to be taking to heart. Intel shares were actually up nearly 2% in Friday afternoon's trading.
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Right now in Europe—where summer is in full swing—a heatwave is in progress. And that heatwave is bringing with it an unexpected failure in Raptor Lake chips. Gabriele Svelto, a senior staff engineer working on the Mozilla browser, brought up the issue out at Mastodon. Svelto noted 'If you have an Intel Raptor Lake system and you're in the northern hemisphere, chances are that your machine is crashing more often because of the summer heat.'
While these are not full system crashes—rather, browser crashes—the news comes from a series of compiled crash reports that seem to be coming from places that are unusually hot. Svelto continued, noting 'Things are so bad at this time that we had to disable a bot that was filing crash reports automatically because it was almost only finding crashes from people with affected systems.' Other explanations, like system cooler issues, could be in play, but the crash reports correlating to heat maps is an unsettling development.
Upgrade Canceled
While Raptor Lake chips are turning downright crispy in this heat, there is another lake with a bit of a problem: Arrow Lake. A recent leak revealed that the Arrow Lake-S update, set to arrive in late 2025, may not provide the improvements in artificial intelligence (AI) capability that was initially hoped.
Arrow Lake chips use the NPU 3 design, which originally came out back in 2023. Reports suggest that there were plans to bump Arrow Lake up to the NPU 4 that shows up in Lunar Lake chips, but apparently, that will not happen after all. NPU 3 can only offer 11.5 trillions of operations per second (TOPS), while NPU 4 offers 48 TOPS. Given that Copilot+ requires 40 TOPS, it seems that Arrow Lake will fall short of the hoped-for capability.
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 30.87% loss in its share price over the past year, the average INTC price target of $21.60 per share implies 6.76% downside risk.
