Intel is offloading virus scanning to its GPUs to improve performance and battery life

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Intel is planning to allow virus scanners to use its integrated graphics chipsets to scan for malicious attacks. The change could see performance and battery life improve on some systems. “With Accelerated Memory Scanning, the scanning is handled by Intel’s integrated graphics processor, enabling more scanning, while reducing the impact on performance and power consumption,” explains Rick Echevarria, Intel’s platform security division VP. “Early benchmarking on Intel test systems show CPU utilization dropped from 20 percent to as little as 2 percent.”

 

Intel’s Threat Detection Technology will be available on 6th, 7th, and 8th generation Intel processors, allowing a variety of machines to take advantage of moving some virus scanning activity to the GPU instead of the CPU. Virus scanners currently use the CPU to detect against memory-based attacks, but a machine takes a performance hit as a result. Intel hopes by moving this way from the CPU that performance and power consumption will improve, as typical machines do not fully utilize onboard graphics cards most of the time.

 

 

 

 

Full article @ The Verge