Intel's biggest ever buy is going ahead

The European Commission has approved Intel's buyout of McAfee – as long as the chip giant allows other companies access to its technology. One of the Commission's concerns was that Intel, by embedding security on its chips, would effectively exclude competitors' products from the market. Intel has promised to make …

[Michael Thibault]

Dear God,

Please make it happen that someone has the sense to ensure, from this day and ever after, until the day of final judgment, that it will always be at least theoretically possible to completely exorcise the hell-spawn that is McAfee, and its spawn in turn, from the swollen belly of Intel. Please please please.

Thank you.

[MinionZero]

It won't work

I can't see how this can stop all malware, so even if it stops say 90% of malware, all that will happen is the malware writers will adapt to use the methods in the 10% that get past Intel. So by the following year, Intel will be stopping the minority of malware.

All Intel will end up doing is creating a pressure for change away from methods of malware writing that are stopped by Intel, towards methods of malware writing that get past Intel's latest marketing gimmick.

[Mage]

Access to the Technology?

Who cares.

If Intel want to waste money on this, only their shareholders need be concerned?

[Steve Davies]

less layers are a good thing then eh ?

be interesting to see what they put on the chip that can achieve much.

or will it be too much ? ? ?

[Britt Johnston]

giant stepping-on-the-spot

Youve got to do something with all those cores. How about a slogan like <64 cores, including 4 for programming!!>.

Security may be the next great resource-eater after windows.

[Anonymous Coward]

Why?

So Intel is just creating a 'rom' chip of anti-virus software instead of a floppy version. It's non-adaptive and a waste of silicon, unless they're creating the circuits to run anti-virus software more efficiently, in which case, there's still no point to it.

[Stuart Elliott]

Competitors don't need to be worried

If Intel put McAfee security on their chips, the only people who should be worried are the punters, who think their PC is now safe from viruses and the likes.

It could be worse, it could have been Symantec, but still ,the rest of the antivirus market have no worries that their products will no longer be needed.

[mhenriday]

My question is -

if Intel bundles McAfee's «security ware» with its chips, does this mean that Intel chips will be platform dependent, with one set of chips for MS, one for Linux distros, one for Mac, etc ? Artifex emptor ?...

Henri