During the course of an interview with Reuters on Friday, Intel's software division head Renee James said that Intel’s McAfee cyber-security product will leverage features that have been already built into its processors.

Revealing that Intel’s first cyber-security product – which the company is co-developing with its McAfee division – will probably be available as an additional service to customers, James said that the service will likely be out before the end of 2011.

Even though James refrained from divulging the pricing for the service, she did mention that the service will work on personal computers that make use of Intel chips sold as long as five years back.

Meanwhile, rebuffing some experts’ speculations that Intel's forthcoming McAfee product will apparently include new tweaks to its chips or will build security measures directly onto the processors, James said that Intel will essentially be utilizing existing features in silicon to build new, more robust, software products, rather than embedding the software in the silicon.

She also added that the chip features will be open to other security software companies, including McAfee’s rival Symantec.

Nonetheless, noting that the cyber-security product will allow users “to subscribe to an enhanced product that's available to those machines,” James told Reuters: "You'll have great security from McAfee in software only, and if you have an Intel core laptop or ultrabook it's going to be even more secure."