Windows PC users have lived under the threat of their precious computers being overrun by malware for a long time, and that is why the antivirus industry exists. For a long time, we relied on third party antivirus programs until Microsoft decided to be serious about it and updated Windows Defender along with the March 2017 Creators Update.
However, virus scanning has always been a pain. It uses a lot of system resources: high CPU load, RAM usage and disk usage. It has led people to either stop whatever they are doing for the virusscan to do its job or do it when the computer is idle. Well it seems Intel has an answer for that.
Intel is being reported to allow virus scanners to offload their work to their integrated GPUs to scan for malicious attacks. The feature from their Threat Detection Technology is called Advanced Memory Scanning where instead of using the CPU to scan for malware, this task is offloaded to the GPU. Apparently according to the company, the previous CPU heavy system could cause processor loads of as much as 20 percent but with this new feature, this will be cut to about 2 percent.
This feature will be available on the 6th, 7th and 8th gen Intel processors, which means if you don’t have a laptop with these processors, you might consider getting a laptop/desktop with the latest silicon.
This is great news since virus scanning on Windows PCs has been a pain for far too long and if you have a not so powerful laptop, it meant you had to postpone those crucial virus scans for performance.
