Intel: 'We ate McAfee to slip security into silicon'

Chip maker and now software player Intel tried on Tuesday to explain the finer points of its $7.7bn acquisition of security software maker McAfee, which closed at the end of February after jumping some European Commission regulatory hurdles.

In a conference call with Wall Street analysts, Renée James, an Intel senior vice president and general manager of the Software and Services Group, and Dave DeWalt, president of the now–wholly owned but independently standing McAfee subsidiary, did their best to explain the rationalization of the biggest acquisition that the 40-year-old chipmaker has ever done.

James said that Intel has made over 20 software acquisitions in the past three years, and many of them are of companies so small that you probably never heard of them. In September 2007, for example, Intel snapped up Havok, a gaming company with 120 employees who specialize in creating the physics engines in virtual worlds that the chip maker. Those 120 experts, who understand where gaming is and where it's going, are experts on graphics and media, and according to James they were instrumental in helping Intel come up with the feature set for the Sandy Bridge family of PC, workstation, and server chips.