Working on computer has been a daily activity for me for the last 15 years. I had been thinking hard if this deal of Intel and McAfee worthwhile? Intel, a traditional Chip maker, wants a good slice of system security world.
Let’s not talk straightway about SOC (system-on-a-chip) as the world is doing now. We need to think a bit out of our normal way to check the motive behind the multi billion dollar acquisition by Intel.
Now is the time to do some serious Tech talk
1. Microsoft has come out with a complete free antivirus suit. That makes many PC’s do a complete shift to it as its free [Yeah! you need to buy windows, nothing in this world is free]. Competitive edge by other Anti-Virus companies is slowly lost because of this move by Microsoft in PC segment. This in turn makes companies like McAfee rethink their strategy of living in the market.
2. A new era has begun of Smart Devices (not just smart phones). Many devices do so much than what they used to do. Like a Ford car that talks, Fridge that smells and indicates missing things that need for next day cooking, Phone that do much more than just talking, net books that does many things for our daily needs. Someone has to take care of these things as they will be vulnerable to attacks soon. Remember someone will attach stings only when it’s very popular and most used.
3. You will soon be hearing jargons like Mobile OS (which is heard a lot now), TV OS, Radio OS, and Home Security OS. Every electronic device will start to run on an OS in order to do a lot of things and of course be connected to the web.
5. Network device will do much more than mere connect between wires. Did you know ? Now you can purchase Internet broadband router and directly plug an USB flash driver in it and download files from a torrent server. Best part you can have your computer off ?
6. We are now talking about concepts like smart grids. Where there will be an array of electronic gadgets embedded with computer chips loaded with software, also servers who are mammoth and can take care of its operations.
7. We always complain that antivirus consumes our system resources and make it very slow. Someone has to do something about it. Google did something amazing with their Chrome browser. It did take scripts, css etc to made it run on the computer processor, as it would be blazing fast. Thus, making the internet experience faster.
Let’s take a closer look at point no 7. Which talks about making computers slow when an Anti-Virus in installed. Even if you buy a Core 2 duo or Core 2 Quad of 3i, 5i, 7i Intel processor it’s not going to get any better. Reason? These software are not programmed to use the available cores in the processor. Someone has to write an explicit program to make it actually work.
What if you integrate computer defence program like anti-virus to be run on hardware itself? Will that not make things much faster? Yup it would.
But there is quite a lot of implementations problems in doing so (guess we should not be talking about it in this article, it’s a big debate by itself, if you are really interested let us know we will do it)
Now as you can see there are quite of technology that is evolving. We need protection for the system. I guess Intel is trying to re-invent itself from a mere chip manufacturing company to a complete suit provider when someone buys a chip from them.