Intel Enters Anti-Virus Market

Jack writes "ITO holds a story on latest Intel investment: "Intel is branching into anti-virus security with a $16 million investment in Czech anti-virus software vendor Grisoft. Grisoft's AVG anti-virus is used on more than 25 million computers worldwide, according to the company."

Comments

Worked for Microsoft... Let's see how Intel handle

[Nerd Systems]

Intel buying an anti-virus software could work out well for the company, especially if they share the success that Microsoft had when buying Giant's Anti-Spyware program and taking over it's development. Intel has the ability to take a good product and make it even better, and possibly even implementing hardware-based virus detection into future processors as well.

If an Intel processor could be made to have hardware-based virus detection, integrating with this software-based virus detection, the team could be a very powerful deterrant to any future virus outbreaks. Imagine the hardware and software components working side by side to protect systems, giving future virus writers another hurdle to be cleared, when developing new virus infestations.

Hopefully the virus software can be made more efficient as well, so that running virus software on a system won't bog it down, hogging system resources like crazy, making people want to not run virus software in the first place. This has long been the bane of the majority of software packages, as the slowdown they cause for certain users, especially gamers, has made them desire to not run the software packages on their systems, resulting in these systems being more vulnerable to a virus outbreak.

Another added benefit that I can see from Intel buying this software, is that eventually if they integrate software and hardware aspects into a cohesive package that is well-implemented and able to fight viruses at a better efficiency then other programs, this will cause Intel based processors to stand out as well, as these days, virus protection and spyware protection are very important to the majority of users out there.

If Intel does this right, this can raise the bar for future processing efforts. Soon there will be more to consider when buying a new system then processing speed and cache size, might have to start considering integrated software as well in the not so distant future...

Good luck on this one Intel...

Re:Antivirus CPU

[Stevyn]

This seems like a big company diversifying and buying a portion of a smaller company, not trying to incorporate antivirus capabilities into their microprocessor line of products.

And Centrino was just a branding for a specific CPU, WiFi, and chipset. It wasn't some flashy new technology, just flashy marketing. I don't think you can really make virus detection software at the CPU level anyway.

Re:I wonder..

[Mahou]

more important: will intel still allow avg free to exist?