Intel has bought out McAfee, why bother?

[Pack3t SynAck3r]

I believe Intel are interested in doing something with Malware protection on the hardware level.
http://gizmodo.com/5616890/intel-wants-t...ting-chips
I think part of it may be to do with that rubbish a while ago, about viruses being spread through dodgy hardware (Not a hard drive, actual hardware) But, doing software exploits is much cheaper than doing hardware. This is pure speculation, read that Gizmodo link for a bit more information.

Good article. I think you are exactly right with what Intel intends to do. It is an odd route to take though considering McAfee has no history dealing with hardware at all. All of the their products are software solutions. Software security is completely different than hardware security. Hardware security en tales stopping malicious activity by physically stopping/disallowing certain bit patterns. Software security is all code and algorithms, working via read/recognize/react. I fail to see how McAfee "big name/little innovation" is well suited for implementing hardware security. It will be interesting to see how much progress is made in this direction by them at least. It would not surprise me if this spawns AMD as well as the mobile phone ARM processor manufacturers to follow this trend. AMD has the notoriety over the years for making breakthroughs in design first i.e. first 64-bit processor, first FSB-less processor etc. I think we will start to see a machine code instruction set design overhaul soon on all processor platforms if they hope to start accomplishing the hardware security implementation.
The hardware viruses you speak of are firmware/BIOS rootkits. They are usually peripheral hardware that has reprogrammed or hacked to accomplish previously unintended routines/tasks. Although there have been instances of motherboard BIOS's being modded as well. The problem though is that these rootkist have to be designed for a specific make and model of hardware. They are no universal implementations of these. They are VERY dangerous if someone were to get infected, but generally physical access is necessary.