Intel says it will utilise McAfee to help it build security features into it’s processors, which currently power the majority of all PCs and Apple Macs around the world.

Both companies have already been working together for the last 18 months and both parties hope that regulatory approval for the buy-out will be granted after both boards for directors agreed the deal unanimously.

News of the surprise move for Intel sent McAfee’s shares soaring y 58% for $47.17 while Intel’s shares fell slightly by 3.2%, though probably not on the basis of this news.

Tim Danton, editor of PC Pro magazine, said the announcement came out of the blue.

“Intel does buy a lot of companies and it does have a lot of more cash than anyone else out there. So it making a big acquisition isn’t a surprise, but you may have thought it more likely to buy another hardware firm,” he told the BBC.

“No doubt Intel is looking ahead and seeing that the laptop and desktop market are probably past their heyday and the big growth area is mobile.

“For a company like Intel, it’s nowhere near as strong in the mobile area as it is in the laptop and desktop areas, so it’s probably looking for new ways to get streams and revenues in the future.”

But he added: “Perhaps that is Intel’s point of view but not everybody else’s. The reaction from investors has been quite negative.”

McAffe was founded in 1987 and has revenues of $2bn a year.  Intel, founded in 1968 has annual revenues of $35bn.

Core Temp concentrates on the cpu, the central processing unit of the computer. It can read the temperature of several cores if the cpu is a multi-core cpu. While this is not a unique feature Core Temp does its best to display the temperatures in the best possible way. The software provides an easy interface that displays all information in one screen.

One great feature for overclockers and new PCs is the logging feature that logs the temperature of the CPU and its cores so that it becomes easy to analyse the temperature changes over time. I still prefer to use Speedfan because it provides additional information that are important to me. If you just want to analyse and check the cpu you are best of with Core Temp though.

Another reason might me memory usage. Core Temp uses a third of the memory that Speedfan uses when running. (3MB compared to 9MB).