Stefan Mileschin

After seven years and a lawsuit from its founder, Intel is finally getting rid of McAfee.

The chip maker has divested its majority holdings in McAfee to investment firm TPG for US$3.1 billion.

McAfee will become a standalone security company, but Intel will retain a minority 49 percent stake. Chipzilla is apparently only interested in internal operations on hardware-level security.

The selloff is a loss for Chipzilla, which spent $7.68 billion to acquire McAfee in 2010. Some analysts think it was the worst thing that Intel ever bought.

Although the idea was good. Intel wanted to add layers of security to hardware and components. It McAfee technology in firmware at the PC and server chip level, and developed security management tools. McAfee technology was used in hardware using real-time operating systems. But most of McAfee was software based and had little ties to Intel’s core hardware strategy.

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