Conventional anti-virus products do not have the same impact on system performance that they used to back in the single core days. Thanks to Intel, as it has come up with a new technology called Accelerated Memory Scanning (AMS) that will help to reduce scanning load on machines with sky lake and newer CPU’s.
AMS will be ready for launch in Intel’s 6th, 7th, and 8th generation processors making it work for most of the PC’s and notebooks launched in last two to three years. The application is compatible to work with Microsoft Defender, an inbuilt security program present in Windows 10 PCs. Microsoft will integrate it with Defender by the end of this month.
The core principle behind the technology is shifting the load from CPU to GPU that will accelerate the scanning process while reducing power consumption and improving CPU’s performance.However, a downside associated with shifting scanning to GPU is that it will considerably impact the performance of GPU dependent apps, especially when most browsers nowadays rely on GPU acceleration.
Meanwhile, Intel has also reported the launch of hardware-level security suite called Security Essentials. This framework will help to standardize all pre-built features pf Intel CPU’s including the Core, Atom and Xenon chipsets.
Chip-level vulnerabilities like Meltdown and Spectre have been identified before too and have laid emphasis on the need of hardware security mechanisms instead of solely being dependent on security tools. However, owing to the presence of multiple vendors within PC ecosystem, building a hardware security platform was always challenging.In such a scenario, Intel’s security Essential will pave a way for more robust hardware security including features such as encryption, protected and verified boot process, storage for sensitive data and keys.