Intel in $7.68bn McAfee takeover

[Gashman]

Do not want. I dont want stuff like that in a CPU.

why not? what downsides could it possible have, hardware security would be almost impossible to bypass and tamper with, gotta be nothing but a good thing.

 

[tntcoder]

why not? what downsides could it possible have, hardware security would be almost impossible to bypass and tamper with, gotta be nothing but a good thing.

Anti virus inside a CPU will not work. You would have to a) have a virus definitions database b) use loads of bandwidth on the HDD/Memory bus and it would be very expensive... The CPU alone doesn't see enough instructions at any one point in time to decide if something could be a virus or not and even then it would be a disaster if your CPU decided to start blocking certain instruction sequences outside of the user's control.

All I can see coming of it is possibly some additional embedded chips to be used by the OS that help with speedy comparisons of code segments to a blacklist database. Or possibly some kind of instruction set that AV software can utilize that might offer some minor speedups.

We shall see anyway.

 

[ste_bla]

Pretty sure AMD have had something to this effect since the Hammer cores (aka athlon 64)

Care to elaborate?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NX_bit ?

 

[iamtheoneneo]

my mrs works for sophos needless to say the word in her office when they heard this was 'meh' - so it doesn't seem like it came as much of a surprise to the rest of the industry neither are they that bothered.

 

[KillBoY_UK]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NX_bit ?

Yer that was it

Looking at it its not strictly for anti virus but nice to see that Intel have this too.

 

[1kiwi]

I'm sure they will make it more optimized for intels cpu's which will be good but then they need to improve the detection rate

I hope so.

 

[kppanic]

would be interesting to see anti virus being integrated into the cpu, obviously lots of things would need worked on ala updating etc etc, but to have antivirus hard coded into a system would solve a lot of problems

I reckon it will be more towards adding specific instructions (i.e. SSE etc) catered towards "anti-virus" software made by McAfee. I think there would still be software necessary, as in you still need to download the antivirus and have regular signature updates but when it runs it runs much faster due to the CPU having optimized instructions.

That is, unless the OS starts picking up on it.