It is obvious that a lot of reasons went into Intel’s acquisition of McAfee, not even Intel tosses around $7.68 billion on a lark.  The reasons are not apparent right away as the news came out of the blue and was not talked about long before hand like many other acquisitions such as Havok.  ExtremeTech feels that this is obviously about a focus on security, perhaps signalling the interest of Intel to mimic what they have done bringing graphics onboard the CPU and merging security and antivirus onto their chips as well.  It also brings a nice expansion to Intel’s neglected software team

The Register sees the Wind River OS and future Atom based embedded products as an obvious reason.  ARM is very strong in the mobile market which Intel is making motions of joining and if they could offer a mobile device with security embedded into the chip on the device as well as every step that the signal takes that might just offer enough incentive for people to move away from ARM based mobile devices.

The Tech Report spotted something that could be a little less beneficial for users, bloatware.  McAfee has recently been very focused on getting their various security software installed as trialware on as many new systems as they can.  With Intel’s probable new ownership of McAfee, they could ensure that their trialware appears on any system with an Intel inside.


"The news of Intel’s $7.68 billion acquisition of McAfee was a bit of a surprise to many of us, and the vague justifications both sides offered for the deal largely focused on the proliferation of mobile devices. However, I couldn’t help but think of another implication of this acquisition for the traditional PC market. Buying McAfee instantly makes Intel one of the leading perpetrators of the pay-for-play bloatware model that infects brand-new PCs from nearly all of the major vendors with heaping amounts of unnecessary software."

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