In the future, you may not have to buy antivirus software for your laptops and mobile devices if Intel is able to live up to the promise of integrating technology from acquisition target McAfee, experts said on Thursday.

In announcing its plans to acquire security company McAfee for $7.68 billion, Intel executives said they see security as being as critical to computing as performance and connectivity and that they plan to combine security with its hardware and expand further into the mobile market.

While Intel has been pushing more and more functionality down into the chips, a marriage with McAfee will mark a shift away from the security firm's traditional product strategy, experts told CNET.

"Delivering security in Intel products and platforms is a huge departure from the way McAfee has delivered security technology in the past, as an add-on software product to an insecure platform," said Chris Wysopal, chief technology officer at Veracode. "This is where security needs to be, baked in."

The strategy dovetails nicely with the fast adoption of mobile devices and the more guarded move to cloud computing, where data is stored on remote servers instead of on local computers and accessed over the Internet, he said.

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