Intel To Acquire McAfee

[DaBees-Knees]

http://www.osnews.com/story/23705/Intel_To_Acquire_McAfee

Chalk this one up on the 'uh, what?'-list of acquisitions. Intel announced today that it has acquired Mcafee, the security and antivirus company we all know and love. The press release is a bit vague on why, exactly, Intel made this rather odd acquisition.
I guess the general gist here is that Intel wants to combine security software and hardware together, but how exactly what works out in real-world advantages for us poor consumers isn't clear from the press release. There's some chatter about how the number of internet-connected devices is increasing rapidly, and that they need to be secured.

"With the rapid expansion of growth across a vast array of Internet-connected devices, more and more of the elements of our lives have moved online," said Paul Otellini, Intel president and CEO, "In the past, energy-efficient performance and connectivity have defined computing requirements. Looking forward, security will join those as a third pillar of what people demand from all computing experiences."

"The cyber threat landscape has changed dramatically over the past few years, with millions of new threats appearing every month," said Dave DeWalt, president and CEO of McAfee, "We believe this acquisition will result in our ability to deliver a safer, more secure and trusted Internet-enabled device experience."

I've never been a particular fan of security companies like McAfee, because they have the tendency to needlessly scare the living daylights out of people, coercing them to buy crappy software that seriously harms computers - it's almost like they themselves are selling a virus.

The best antivirus and antimalware tool today (for Windows) is Microsoft's own Security Essentials, which has a simple and easy interface, is very light on resources, and most important of all, doesn't get in your face all the damn time. Oh, and of course, it's free.

I'm not sure I would agree with that last conclusion. 

[Max™]

well i dont trust Norton, its just like a virus, you cant remove it easily, its so hard to get rid of and has bits of it all over your system,

and if i remember correctly, some time ago Norton and McAfee was in court for deliberately sending you a virus when your renewal is due, to encourage you to pay, more like show their true colours as a 'pay us or else' threat,

a Free anti-virus has nothing to gain doing this, so they don't bother,
trust a free one, they are easy to uninstall if you want to try more than one and wont infest your pc like a Norton virus

[MinersLantern]

Why?
Shouldn't Intel stick to job one? Making the most screamingly fast ICs that mankind can conjure up and for cheap?
These silly corporations should stop trying to be all things for all people. Just do one thing and do it well.
China can take Intel over too if they are going to waste time and money on irrelevant little tangents like software (of any kind). Next they will be financing home loans. (it would not surprise me).

[silicon_toad2000]

Why an acquisition or why mcaffee?

http://www.intc.com/releasedetail.cfm?ReleaseID=500518&ReleasesType=Home

the acquisition - because Intel already has its fingers into a lot of pie's. Growing Intel's market share at this point hits up against the law of diminishing returns, the cost to increase turnover and market share grows at a much faster rate than market share. Acquisitions such as mcaffe are in a market similar enough to provide some economies of scale, but different enough that the products will not be competing for market share.

Mcaffee - because it is already large and established. While there are better security companies out there, acquiring small operations and trying to fold them into a larger corporate culture is very difficult and the shock can sometimes destroy the business. In saying that Intel's $US40-50B vs mcaffee's $US2B turnover still makes mcaffee a small  fish in a big pond.

Focussing on just one thing, no matter how well you do it is very risky, especially in technology.

[White Stripes]

Shouldn't Intel stick to job one? Making the most screamingly fast ICs that mankind can conjure up and for cheap?

http://arstechnica.com/hardware/reviews/2008/07/atom-nano-review.ars (yes i know the review is old but the atom.... really hasnt improved much...)

run folding@home on an atom sometime......

note: i picked these two cpus because you said 'cheap' and i wanted to put an emphasis on that vs performance...

[Pri]

Why?
Shouldn't Intel stick to job one? Making the most screamingly fast ICs that mankind can conjure up and for cheap?
These silly corporations should stop trying to be all things for all people. Just do one thing and do it well.
China can take Intel over too if they are going to waste time and money on irrelevant little tangents like software (of any kind). Next they will be financing home loans. (it would not surprise me).

Buying McAfee will assist Intel in producing more secure chips. You know about features such as NX Bit? it is a feature that allows CPU's to mark certain memory pages as non-executable. This security feature is very important because it significantly lowers the amount of buffer exploits available to malicious programmers.

This is one good example of where processor level security has been made more robust and there are more ways it can be done as-well. The Memory controller is now integrated in to the CPU and with the advanced logic present on the same silicon it could be made possible for the CPU to detect injections mid-load and to send data about that attack to the operating system for it to take action. This is theoretical but it is another viable way for processor security to be bolstered.

CPU Logic has come a long way it is able to harbor and execute entire software programs all from within the CPU for example Intel recently integrated a VNC Server in to the 1156 Socket CPU series which enables you to remote in to the computer regardless of operating system support for VNC. With this sort of low level transparent control available you can only imagine what kind of advanced security features they can come up with. Anti-viruses that can scan not from the top down but from the bottom up where no rootkit can hide malicious software.

One thing for sure Intel has some of the brightest engineers in the world they have been behind many of our technological advancements including USB, HDMI, x86 and more if they bought McAfee they have a good reason and I don't think it will be long before we see this acquisition bare fruit.

[White Stripes]

McAfee-on-die? .... hope they increase the cpu power to handle that (anyone else get a chill thinking of that?)

HDMI is DVI repackaged with sound and DRM included...

and x86 is -definitly- showing its age..... ARM based cpus is where things really need to start heading... (opinions will ofcourse differ on this... but you cant say x86 even with its AMD64 extension isnt showing its age...)

[Pri]

No one suggested that you would have the Antivirus on the Die itself simply that McAfee can provide insight which could result in chip level security enhancements over what has already been implemented. Intel are predominantly a hardware company and they only use software to expand the situations where their hardware products can be utilized meaningfully. I do not expect this acquisition to change their stance on that.

Some Examples of their Software projects that they use to sell Hardware include the Matrix RAID software, NAS Toolkit, Remote Game Rendering Software, High-bandwidth Digital Content Protection, Embedded VNC Server, Remote Display over WiFi (With Netgear as Partner), VT for hardware based Virtulisation, Embedded AES Encryption/Decryption in Core i7 32nm parts. And this is just off the top of my head they have done much much more.

DVI was made by the Digital Display Working Group of which Intel is a member and played a big part in developing the DVI specification. So of course HDMI is based on the perfectly sound DVI standard. HDMI has far surpassed it in-fact by supporting 4K video with 3D without increasing cable thickness and providing return paths for sound and a 100Mb LAN connection. DVI is currently maxed out at 2560x1600 @ 60 Hz and if you want to do 3D you need to drop down to 1920x1200 but still use the Dual-Link DVI Cable (quite a thick cable).

And you didn't mention USB because that is a great standard and I get the sense you just wanted to be negative. USB 1 2 and 3 are all thanks to Intel and they are already working on the next generation of peripheral connector which with what they have shown so far is once again backwards compatible with USB whilst offering optical connectivity alongside a copper electrical connection. Speeds are out of this world.

And although x86 is showing its age we do not have a competitor in the desktop space. We do not have desktop class ARM processor designs available. What we do have are graphics processors with immense floating point performance that absolutely eclipses x86 based processors but these lack sophisticated instruction sets. PowerPC was seen as a good RISC based rival to x86 but as we saw happen a few years ago the power consumption was to high and the performance per watt was nothing in comparison to what Intel can currently deliver.

Where does X86 fail? In the Mobile space against ARM. And the main reason for that is x86 needs a lot of silicon devoted to the specification itself. It has picked up a lot of baggage and in the limited physical spaces of mobile devices and low price points x86 cant compete. But again without ARM scaling up to match the big boys we won't be replacing Desktop systems with ARM based processors anytime soon.

And of course I give AMD credit for the 64-bit extension to x86. It saved us from a costly transition to another architecture, one that Intel wanted to mastermind with Itanium possibly to cut AMD out of the market (I would have loved to see those anti-trust investigations) and Intel have done a lot of bad things like denying NVIDIA a QPI bus License even though it was presumed the FSB license that NVIDIA held would have crossed over to the QPI as-well if Intel never renamed it. In-fact I believe they renamed it simply to void their previous contract with NVIDIA, very shady and I hope NVIDIA win in court later this year over this dispute.

[White Stripes]

ill give em USB... tho device independant DMA (like firewire) would have been nice (yes i know of the firewire memory read exploit) but... some sort of better quality control on the devices that plug into USB before they can put the 'sticker' on the box/product would have been really nice (plenty of devices out there that boggle the mind that they work in any kind of capacity at all)


...but im not a big fan of HDMI.... it may have the bandwidth for hi-res but they seem to want to put too much into it imo ...return sound? ok.. so the monitor has a microphone builtin along side its really bad speakers... but what if i want my sound to come from somewhere else? or go somewhere else for that matter... without needing to daisy chain the cables through other devices... ...thank the tech gods pc soundcards and set-top-boxes still have seperate audio connectors... ethernet? um... huh? usb would have made more sense there for things like shutter glasses transmitters and webcams...... and the DRM thing still really ticks me off... but it seems every product we get has some sort of DRM in it anymore... even VHS had an analog "DRM" added as an afterthought by a 3rd party company (macrovision)... tho it was never actually part of the VHS standard...


btw, doesnt i5 have the AES encrypt/decrypt too?


odd that intel would hobble nvidia considering intels horrid gma chipset ...
it always seemed; intel + nvidia = good windows machine and AMD + ATI = good linux machine (kinda ironic amd bought ati)


...i wish VIA made a full-size ATX board (ever used a box in times long past that had the combo of a via mvp chipset the cyrix M2 cpu and a s3 virge videocard? heh... ) ...the 'big boys' are depressing...

[White Stripes]

http://beagleboard.org/

give this a peek if youve not seen it.... i know its not a desktop but the geek factor in making into one makes it worth it

and the next version is even better;

http://beagleboard.org/hardware-xM

id love to play with one of these

[Pri]

ill give em USB... tho device independant DMA (like firewire) would have been nice (yes i know of the firewire memory read exploit) but... some sort of better quality control on the devices that plug into USB before they can put the 'sticker' on the box/product would have been really nice (plenty of devices out there that boggle the mind that they work in any kind of capacity at all)

A lot of people like openness and choice. If Intel or anyone else for that mater was going to pre-vet USB devices it would become a costly venture the same way that getting WHQL drivers for Windows is exspensive. Personally I don't buy cheap USB devices, problem solved

...but im not a big fan of HDMI.... it may have the bandwidth for hi-res but they seem to want to put too much into it imo ...return sound? ok.. so the monitor has a microphone builtin along side its really bad speakers... but what if i want my sound to come from somewhere else? or go somewhere else for that matter... without needing to daisy chain the cables through other devices... ...thank the tech gods pc soundcards and set-top-boxes still have seperate audio connectors... ethernet? um... huh? usb would have made more sense there for things like shutter glasses transmitters and webcams...... and the DRM thing still really ticks me off... but it seems every product we get has some sort of DRM in it anymore... even VHS had an analog "DRM" added as an afterthought by a 3rd party company (macrovision)... tho it was never actually part of the VHS standard...

The reason that the 100Mb LAN connection is now built in is so that you can have for example a Cable Box that is connected to your TV via HDMI and your Cable Box now acts as a Router and enables the TV Internet & Lan Access to your Home Network. Enabling your TV Software to stream video over DLNA from your other computers and also access web content such as Netflix & Youtube. It is underused right now but the point is the standard is forever changing but always maintains backwards compatibility. Cable thickness is very thin and I know that no one likes DRM but HDCP is also in DVI and we have DRM on Display Port as-well. It is just an accepted part of dealing with video these days.

btw, doesnt i5 have the AES encrypt/decrypt too?

Nope. At the moment the only chips which have dedicated AES Encryption logic built in are the Core i7 980X and Core i7 970. Both processors are 6-Core (12 Thread with HT) processors on the 1366 Socket platform. Both processors are based on the new 32nm fabrication technology that Intel are just starting to use and they are generally the fastest x86 processors on the planet. We should see 32nm Core i5 and i7's on the 1156 socket later this year that have the same AES encryption system embedded.

odd that intel would hobble nvidia considering intels horrid gma chipset ...
it always seemed; intel + nvidia = good windows machine and AMD + ATI = good linux machine (kinda ironic amd bought ati)

...i wish VIA made a full-size ATX board (ever used a box in times long past that had the combo of a via mvp chipset the cyrix M2 cpu and a s3 virge videocard? heh... ) ...the 'big boys' are depressing...

The reason that Intel are trying to shut NVIDIA out of the chipset business is because it is 40% of their revenue. They sell CPU's but then they want to sell you the Chipset to go with it. The X58 chipset which is their flagship and it costs around $50 USD.

This Anti-competitiveness has already hurt the market. Intel do not intend to build USB 3.0 or SATA 3.0 in to their Chipsets until next year with the X68 chipset. If NVIDIA had a license they would have already offered a chipset months ago that had USB 3.0 and SATA 3.0 built in which would have pushed Intels hand. AMD have already got a chipset with both built in even. And VIA is in the same boat as NVIDIA they lack a QPI bus contract so they cant release a chipset for Intels processors even if they wanted to unfortunately.

Personally I buy whatever is fastest. I'm currently kicking around a Core i7 940 @ 4GHz with 12GB of 1600MHz Memory and Dual GTX 260's by NVIDIA. I'll be replacing those 260s with two 480s before the month is up and I'm likely to change the Core i7 940 for a Core i7 970 in September.