What happened
It's Jan. 5 and at long last, the 2022 Consumer Electronics Show (CES 2022) is underway in Las Vegas.
In contrast to last year's fully virtual event, this year's CES is going the hybrid route, with some exhibitors coming in person while others appearing only virtually. One thing that is definitely not virtual -- but real -- is the effect that the CES presentations seem to be having on tech stock prices, and semiconductor stocks in particular.
As chipmakers demo their wares today, shares of Intel (INTC -9.20%) (a "featured exhibitor" at CES 2022) are enjoying a nice 2.4% pop in afternoon trading, as of 2:22 p.m. ET. In contrast, Intel rivals Nvidia (NVDA 6.18%) and Advanced Micro Devices (AMD 2.37%) are moving in the opposite direction -- down 4.3% and 4.6%, respectively.
Image source: Getty Images.
So what
So did Intel buy itself a pass on the chipmaker stock price declines, along with its "featured exhibitor" status at CES?
Not exactly. But investors do seem to be taking a shine to Intel's products unveiled at the show, and seem to be thinking that they position Intel's stock (if not necessarily Intel's business) to outperform its rivals in the coming year. As IGN Entertainment reported yesterday, "Intel is planning to take on AMD and Nvidia in the GPU market this year, with its first generation of Arc series GPUs codenamed Alchemist slated to release sometime early this year."
Granted, AMD and Nvidia are also focusing heavily on graphics this year (graphics being the historical roots of each of these companies). Yesterday, for example, data analytics company Lynx highlighted the more than two dozen new chips that AMD will bring to market in 2022, with emphasis on the Radeon RX 6000S and RX 6000M chips for gaming laptops. And IGN seemed particularly impressed by the prospect of Nvidia bringing to market a new "RTX 3090 Ti" chip with "24GB of GDDR6X VRAM and 40 teraflops of GPU performance."
Translating the tech-speak into English, IGN helpfully explained that this chip, when it comes to market, will be "roughly 11% faster than its non-Ti RTX 3090 variant."
Now what
At least one analyst still thinks the advantage lies with Intel, however. In a note out this morning, Northland Capital Markets said it is upgrading Intel stock to outperform based on its view that Intel has laid out for investors a coherent strategy to reverse its decline "for the first time in many years," reports StreetInsider.com.
Beyond just Intel's efforts to compete with AMD and Nvidia in graphics, Northland believes that Intel is upping its game in basic chip technology, to the point that it could "significantly reduce the AMD/INTC performance gap if not eliminate it in 2023." Northland sees Intel collaborating with Taiwan Semiconductor on production of next generation 3 nm and even 2 nm semiconductors, and refocusing its internal efforts on "manufacturing [static random access memory chips] which dominate modern CPU die area."
More significant for investors, Northland simply thinks that Intel stock at less than 10 times earnings is a better bargain than "high multiple stocks" such as AMD (which costs 43 times earnings today) and Nvidia (which costs 93 times earnings). In contrast to its pricier rivals, which may suffer from "multiple compression" this year (i.e., investors may not want to pay high multiples of earnings to own the stocks, resulting in falling stock prices), low-priced Intel stock could rise as much as 14% in value over the course of the next year.
Investors who watched their Intel shares underperform the market all year long in 2021 can only hope that Northland is right about that, and that Intel will finally reverse its slump in 2022.
