Early this year semiconductor giant Intel (News - Alert) Corp. bought security and antivirus developer McAfee for about $7.7 billion. Now the company is ready to talk about the fruits of that acquisition.

Speaking to international multimedia news agency Reuters (News - Alert), Intel’s head of software division Renee James indicated that the company’s first security product will leverage security-related features that have been built into Intel microprocessors for years. In short, the Intel executive meant that the new software product will offer enhanced features sets on a wide range of existing Intel-based computers as well as forthcoming processor chips.

According to Reuters, James would not discuss pricing for the service, which is expected to be released before the end of this year. However, he said that it would work on PCs using Intel chips sold as far as five years ago.

Additionally, the executive told Reuters that "It will allow you to subscribe to an enhanced product that's available to those machines." "You'll have great security from McAfee (News - Alert) in software only, and if you have an Intel core laptop or ultrabook it's going to be even more secure," Renee said.

As per the reporting in Yahoo! News, Intel does not plan to build security software features directly into its processors, which some industry watchers had speculated after Intel acquired McAfee. Further commenting on the upcoming security product from Intel, James said that the on-chip features that the Intel/McAfee security product would be leveraging were open to other security software companies, such as Symantec (News - Alert).

With recent high profile security breaches, computer security firms are under increasing pressure to retool their offerings. Traditionally, the desktop security software has been doing a good job protecting consumers from malware, trojans, and viruses, as long as they kept it up to date. Hence, attackers have increasingly turned their focus on enterprise and cloud-based systems, wrote Yahoos! News.

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