The greater the truth, the greater the libel - Lord Ellenborough
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Intel shells out $7.68 billion for McAfee
CHIPMAKER Intel has announced that it will buy the well known insecurity outfit McAfee for $7.68 billion.
Chipzilla will be purchasing all of McAfee's common stock at a price of $48 per share, resulting in the firm becoming a wholly owned subsidiary of Intel, reporting to its Software and Services Group. Intel claimed that the deal will "ultimately better protect customers" as their devices connect to the Internet.
Intel said that security is becoming increasingly important as new devices such as televisions, cars and medical devices go online. Intel CEO Paul Otellini said that the deal "brings us incredibly talented people with a track record of delivering security innovations, products and services that the industry and consumers trust to make connecting to the Internet safer and more secure."
It's questionable whether insecurity vendors such as McAfee do 'make the Internet safer'. Just about every vendor reports that the Internet is becoming increasingly insecure, and McAfee issued such a claim just last week. That said, it seems Intel wants to use this acquisition to look at ways to incorporate security software in mobile devices, perhaps using its Moorestown hardware.
Intel said the acquisition is part of its mobile wireless strategy. McAfee CEO Dave DeWalt said, "We believe this acquisition will result in our ability to deliver a safer, more secure and trusted Internet-enabled device experience."
If you are somewhat surprised at Intel's sudden interest in an insecurity vendor, you're not alone. The firm explained that it is making security a priority. "Intel has elevated the priority of security to be on par with its strategic focus areas in energy-efficient performance and Internet connectivity," it said in a statement.
It is likely that Intel will look to optimise McAfee's software to run on its processors, perhaps even providing hardware security features in its chipsets. One wonders if Intel's archrival AMD can meet this challenge. µ
Tags: Intel
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For a CPU-maker, a good GPU-maker is better than a bad annoyance-maker.
Versailles, Wed 25 Aug 2010 10:37:00 +0200
If they build it in there had better be a way to turn it off..
What's missing is Norton 11. The beta is simply amazing. It is a very good acquisition. Too bad MS is running the show, thel turn NAV 11 into spyware....oh well.
They want ownership of the McAfee's technology assets & resources.
Intel want to build this type of security into the hardware/firmware level, not try and mix it with Symantec and the rest by peddling McAfee's security software.
Anti-virus = slow computer = upgrade = Profit for Intel
with all the comments about anti-virus programs slowing down computers, and the talk over the last few years about using GPUs for antivirus software, this makes perfect sense.
360x faster on a gpu in one case: http://www.geek.com/articles/news/kapersky-labs-releases-gpu-anti-virus-that-runs-360x-faster-than-on-core-2-duo-cpu-20091215/
Just do google for "anti-virus on gpu" (or is it let google do you?) and let the plethora of news articles fill the void of answers as to why.
I work for an ISP that bundles McAfee with broadband. Horrid program, just slows PCs down and is not really all that good at detecting malware.
I tell customers to uninstall it and use MSE or Avira Free instead.
I'm guessing Intel's interest is not really in the technology.
In April, McAfee security software disabled a lot of Windows XP Service Pack 3 PCs. And according to Inq (which read it someplace), Intel had a lot of those... not eating the Windows 7 or Vista dog food, as the saying goes.
So maybe they want to apply the same technology to competitors' products...
... the bigwig in charge of Itanium is behind this.
Tired of getting teased by the others for the billions sunk into IA64 with little to show for it, he manipulated the board in order to set up another bigwig for the purchase McAfee. Then, whenever anyone asks him about the IA64 dosh, he can just say "yeah, but we spent 7 billion on McAfee, and look how bad that tanked".
'Tis the only thing that makes sense ...
It's just too weird, there has to be something underneath this acquisition that we weren't told... I don't know what it could be though...
First off, @bigger_luddite:
intel tried this once in the 80's, and when it failed intel abandoned the technology, one of its then employees took that technology and IP and started Trend Micro...
Next,
I dont think there could be a more fitting union then intel and mcafee! I just wonder if its going to be the bully protecting the retarded guard dog, or the retarded guad dog protecting the bully.
This is a great purchase on intels part, i wish they would make more purchases like this, the faster they can devalue themselves the better.
I love the fact that they're stupid enough to purchase well established software companies that have a significant presence, i'm sure Andrew Cuomo is giggling his ass off right now, this is an election year for him. I can imagine he's told his secretary to send intel a nice box of chocolates and a lovely thank you note for giving him an avenue to help further his re-election campaign...
Why are they buying up security software companies? This makes ZERO sense. Give it some time, eventually they will sell this company off as a loss.
...Or else I can see other security outfits like symantec whining about intel optimizing their newly adquired product while harming the competition.
Not that it matters anyway, security software these days is useless.
When a company gets big enough it tries to get to anything that it thinks makes money for them. Same thing happen to M$, who have thought that a software company would get into game consoles and even MP3 players and other things.
By the way, wasn't there a better security firm for buying?
oh dear. has intel lost it? next thing you know it'll be walking 'round with it's underpants on its head and saying "wibble."
I just hope this is about Intel employees getting so pissed with having to scrape this shit of computers that they decided to buy it, bring it to an empty field and shoot it.
And I'll never have to deal with that awful mess.
This is intel's Phobic side- but what's to fear from lil' ole AMD?
This, if anything, shows that Intel has lost its sense of direction. It was bad enough when IDF turned from a tech event to a marketing one. Now Intel doesn't seem to even know what business it is in.
If one were to peer at tea leaves, I might predict a TI-like development, with amoeba-like bloat, followed by a sell off of non-core businesses.
The cost of that bloat to TI's bottom line was enormous over the years, as surely this McAfee event will be to Intel's. Discounting the fact that parking cash in bonds is not a good way to go at this time, I'm still left wondering if there's something in the water at Intel's board room?
I'm glad for the shareholders of McAfee, as they will certainly handsomely profit from this event.
actually this is an Intel move,
considering Intels AVX extentions.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/05/06/amd_does_avx/
Back in August 2007, as it became apparent to AMD that Intel had finally woken up from its capitalistic and technological slumber, AMD opened up a set of Streaming SIMD Extensions (SSE) for its x64 processors that, in a cheeky move, it called SSE5. These comprised 128-bit extension to the 64-bit X64 architecture of the Opterons, including 46 base instructions and 124 additional instructions that were to be implemented in AMD's "Bulldozer" processor cores, slated for 2009 back then but now coming out in 2011. (There are already some 128-bit instructions in the Opterons, such as the 128-bit floating point units that made their debut with the "Barcelona" Opterons.)
While AMD's proposed SSE5 instructions would speed up certain algorithms used in high performance computing, multimedia and security applications, SSE5 is not a superset of Intel's SSE4 instructions, even though there is quite a bit of overlap. And that means programmers and their compilers having to be mindful of the underlying instruction set when they optimize their code for a Xeon or Opteron chip.
One again they can bake in security features through AVX extentions and, again lock AMD out as they did with Intels SSE extentions. But this time with the force behind Open(CL/GL), and Kronos, it appears to be a divide that will be settled mono-a-mano
Has all the signs of corporate senility, especially getting WAY outside their core biz: "Security is the next big thing!" -- "We ought to buy into security. Who's the market leader?" -- "Hey, we have that much cash in the bank. Why not scale up our plans and just take over the market right away?"
All downhill from there. I bet that five years from now, Intel sells off McAfee for about a billion. -- BUT that may be the PLAN, because of TAX advantages. Never assume that folly doesn't pay off for corporations.
Really unuexpected. Especially given how dreadful the actual technology is. When I had my own PC maintenance company I got to the stage where one of the first things I did when I got a faulty machine in was to remove McAfee and Norton - they were the leading cause of problems with systems due to their limpit like parasitic coupling with the OS.
Hopefully they will clean it up. Why anyone would want a crash causing resource hog on their system when they can get a FREE unobtrusive alternative is beyond me.
Probably makes good business sense though as most people using computers haven;t a clue and don;t know they are being shafted by putting this malware on their machines.