I expect that McAfee lass comes with a dowry and besides, her divan would suit nicely in the smoking room; she certainly knows her way around the kitchen.

How many customers to do McAfee have on annual renewal payment for antivirus?

If a customer buys a pc every 4 years and McAfee are charging $30/year, then McAfee are making 2x as much as Microsoft on a regular family pc.

How much are Microsoft worth?

Many people just sign up with McAafee when the warning comes up on the screen. That's a lot of regular cash.

Now lets look at Intel's dodgy dealings. Intel has been "bonusing" AMD out of the way for years. Perhaps this McAfee deal is another way to "bonus" AMD out of the way.

For example: Dell will get 40% of McAfee signup fee if it sells only Intel cpu pc's (or a higher than X percentage), or it will only get 20% of the signup fee if it sells AMD cpu pc's too.

Intel could do some Retail Promotions so stores can earn discounts if they promote McAfee/Intel on package deals.

Or security is going to be a larger concern as Data Laws and punishments increase, and Intel are going after this market sector. By combining hardware and AV they can create a better solution.

From a source you'll have to search for:

"At the most recent Intel R&D day, Intel CTO Justin Rattner did a Q&A session with the press in which he was asked something to the effect of, "What do you spend most of your time working on these days?" Rattner didn't hesitate in answering "security."

He then told an anecdote about how he was watching Intel CEO Paul Otellini being interviewed by Charlie Rose, and Otellini told Rose, "I've given our company a charter to make [security] job one." Rattner laughed and told us that this statement seemed to come from out of the blue, and it took him and other Intel execs by surprise. But from that day forward, Rattner was focused on security."

Now, if the above account is accurate, that Otellini surprised his own CTO and others with a new focus on "security", then the rationale for blowing $7.68 billion is FAR LESS CLEAR, and more like my first guess: corporate senility.

Demerjian tries to rationalize it, and fails, just says "if (miracle occurs) then it'll be a brilliant move".

Charlie Demerjian provides a more insightfull anaysis over at SemiAccurate:
http://www.semiaccurate.com/2010/08/20/why-intel-bought-mcafee/

ok. how about this. intel's core business is microprocessors, obviously they do invest in non-related markets and had they sunk, say, 300Mil on the deal this might just be a run of the mill investment in something they want to project they feel strongly about. however 7.68Bil would buy you a hell of a lot of projecting and it's way up on what mcafee is worth in its traditional business. note that intel specifically said they were interested in the R&D section, so let me shoot in the breeze for a sec. what if mcafee has come up with technologies and methods to enhance processors (in general or x86-specific) that would effectively negate all most common attack vectors and reducing the software components of an AV to simply monitoring the hardware processes. had that been the case, by bringing this technology to fruition they'd be cannibilizing their own market. so they made a deal with the top runner for a colossal wad of cash and a number of deal sweeteners on top of that. 5 years down the line Intel makes a chip that's a real tough cookie to break which the world+dog wants to upgrade to, and the rest of the now ex-antivirus also-rans go the way of the dodo. huge win for just about everybody, definitely worth enough cash to build 2 extra fabs with.

A few years ago Intel bought into Grisoft, makers of AVG anti-virus. I don't know if they still hold that investment:

http://www.avg.com/us-en/314

I've said it before, Intel are not interested in the existing McAfee software products.

They are interested in outright ownership of the technology, assets and resources of McAfee.

They are looking to implement security at the hardware/firmware level, and want no issues of patents and/or copyright to come back and bite them.

Even in the most positive light mcafee wasn't worth more than 80 million tops, they aren't a popular package but even if they were a viruskiller is not worth that much, plus MS is now moving to supply protection so that makes the position of anti-virus companies even worse.
So yeah this must be some economical money shuffling trick, or intel went insane en masse.

Intel claims to produce fastest CPUs known to mankind; however users don’t seem to feel or realize the processing power. On market analysis McAfee products were found to hog the machines carrying Intel [tum-ta-tum] stickers. The immense computing power of i5, i7 was never felt by common mortals, Sluggishness was reported around the world, hence in order to reduce the load on the CPU, someone in Intel [must be the Robot who gets offended on their commercials] gave this brilliant idea.

doesn't seem to pan out. So I repeat my guess that insiders thought up a way to loot Intel, and somehow put it over. A species of vulture capitalists aren't content to wait for distress, but go out and create it; could be any number of those leveraging / pushing the deal. Without the assumption that corporate officers are doing their honest best for shareholders, the true purpose is wide open.

For Intel, this is a totally worthless deal. The money could well be spent of a smaller security company and the remaining for its core business. Intel has almost nothing (yes) in the mobile segment dominated by Arm.