This begs the question why?

[green granite]

The world's biggest chip maker, Intel, has agreed to buy the security technology firm, McAfee.

Intel will pay $7.68bn (£5bn) in cash.

Under the terms of the deal, Intel said it would pay $48 per share in cash for McAfee, almost 60% higher than its closing price on Wednesday.

Through buying McAfee, a leading security technology firm, Intel intends to build security features into its microprocessors which go into products such as laptops and phones.

Full article: BBC News - Intel in $7.68bn McAfee takeover

[Keef]

If Intel chips are going to come with McAfee built-in, then I'm going to be buying shares in AMD.

[BOAC]

Yep- how to kill a product.

[batninth]

Hmm, the US press around this story is suggesting that Intel will be building processors aimed at delivering security applications, not that McAfee will be integrated into Intel cores in general - try this analysis.

That would make much more sense to me, we're seeing a big move towards "Appliance" based processing, where you buy a specialised piece of kit to perform a function, for example a database appliance or a data deduplicating appliance. In this paradigm, a security appliance makes a lot of sense

Of course, those of us "of a certain age"(*) may look at this appliance based computing & say something like "Didn't mainframes work like this when we were young?"


(*) A euphanism for "Grumpy old b*****r"

[The Nr Fairy]

I have an interest in this - because McAfee compete with my mob in an area or two. Will be interesting to see what happens to the bits of McAfee which don't easily plug in to microprocessors.

[mixture]

we're seeing a big move towards "Appliance" based processing, where you buy a specialised piece of kit to perform a function

No.

Appliances are for SMEs.... easy to deploy and support.

I reckon pigs will fly before you see Oracle, SQL, Exchange et. al. in appliance format.

My money is on Intel branded McAfee IP based ASICs on Intel desktop/laptop chipsets.