{"id":598,"date":"2011-03-17T23:46:23","date_gmt":"2011-03-17T22:46:23","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/cerezo.name\/blog\/?p=598"},"modified":"2024-10-14T14:24:06","modified_gmt":"2024-10-14T12:24:06","slug":"code-of-virii-set-in-silicon","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/cerezo.name\/blog\/2011\/03\/17\/code-of-virii-set-in-silicon\/","title":{"rendered":"Code of Virii Set in Silicon"},"content":{"rendered":"

I\u2019m eager to learn the outcome from Intel\u2019s biggest acquisition ever, McAfee. As company representatives have said in a conference call with Wall Street analysts<\/a>, they plan to push functionality down from userland to the die chip, just below the OS<\/span>. And that is a really bizarre rationalization for this acquisition, since antivirus are memory and I\/O bound processes, not CPU-bound applications (see \u201cCharacterizing Antivirus Workload Execution<\/a>\u201d for more information), that\u2019s why significant speed-ups aren\u2019t likely to be attained. And all improvements Intel is going to put into the chips should be also offered to other antivirus companies, otherwise they risk facing antitrust action as the EU<\/span> has forewarned, coincidentally the same reason Microsoft hasn\u2019t be able to make a good antivirus even if everybody would benefit from a development like that (ironically, the last one being a case of a public bad<\/a> from public intervention).<\/p>\n

Security on a chip should be as simple as possible. I still remember the security fiasco within the Intel 286 ring model caused by an undocumented instruction, LOADALL<\/span><\/a>, which rendered it useless. In my opinion, progress will be more in the vein of current virtualization offerings<\/a>, seeking to improve performance with multiple virtual machines within a host.<\/p>\n

Finally, note that EBITDA<\/span> margins aren\u2019t exactly attractive, in particular for a company like Intel:<\/p>\n

[trefis_forecast ticker=\u201cINTC<\/span>\u201d driver=\u201c1318\u201d]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I\u2019m eager to learn the outcome from Intel\u2019s biggest acquisition ever, McAfee. As company representatives have said in a conference call with Wall Street analysts, they plan to push functionality down from userland to the die chip, just below the OS<\/span>. And that is a really bizarre rationalization for this acquisition, since antivirus are memory [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"wp_typography_post_enhancements_disabled":false,"ngg_post_thumbnail":0},"categories":[6,13],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/cerezo.name\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/598"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/cerezo.name\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/cerezo.name\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/cerezo.name\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/cerezo.name\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=598"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"http:\/\/cerezo.name\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/598\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1661,"href":"http:\/\/cerezo.name\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/598\/revisions\/1661"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/cerezo.name\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=598"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/cerezo.name\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=598"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/cerezo.name\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=598"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}