Many investors seem to be taking lightly the recent acquisition of McAfee by Intel Corp. (INTC). In fact, they seem bewildered by the move. Why in the world would a maker of chip sets want to own a data security software provider? Let me tell you why.

The days when we subscribed to a third-party service to download those clunky security patches will soon be gone -- and not missed. Those annoying downloads and incessant updates will go the way of the dinosaurs. Intel is preparing for the next generation of data security. Soon your data security will be provided as an integral part of your data handling and communication devices. It will finally be manufactured right into your chip sets. That's the way it should have been long ago.

Intel (NASDAQ:INTC) does not seem to be satisfied with the beating it's giving AMD (NYSE:AMD). It wants to bring out an even larger line of chips aimed straight at its rival.

According to The Wall Street Journal, the chip company "gave new details of plans to introduce chips that pack four, six, eight or more electronic brains on a piece of silicon to boost calculating performance."

AMD has a new quad-core chip called Barcelona, and many of the company's plans to recover market share are based on the product.

Intel's new products will make PCs run much faster and will also give its a stronger case in the server market. Some of the new chips are particularly good at running graphics, a market that AMD's ATI unit has done well in over the years. The other company with a large foothold in that industry is Nvidia (NASDAQ:NVDA).

All of the chip companies have been hurt over the last six months based on the assumption that a slowdown in the economy will cut into PC sales growth. But, Intel is off less than its rivals. Its stock is down less than 20% over the period while AMD and Nvidia are both off more than 40%.

Intel can weather a tough market. It has the balance sheet and gross margins to hold on and spend huge sums on the R&D effort which is behind its newest products. AMD, carrying $5 billion in debt and with no profits, faces real problems keeping up.

Douglas A. McIntyre is an editor at 247wallst.com.

The news hasn't been good for Qualcomm Inc. (NASDAQ: QCOM) lately in its myriad lawsuits with Broadcom. Its most recent setback occurred in Santa Ana, California as the San Diego company lost a dispute with Broadcom Corp. (NASDAQ: BRCM) over three patents that Qualcomm has now been declared as willfully infringing. The news came on the heels of an expected ITC resolution (that was again delayed, this time to June 7) on whether to ban phones containing Qualcomm's chipsets that have been determined to violate another Broadcom patent.

This most recent case centered around five patents that Broadcom acquired and then asserted against Qualcomm. By the end of the litigation phase, Qualcomm was found to infringe upon three patents broadly covering topics of video encoding, network management, and hierarchical networks. Broadcom was awarded $19.6 million in damages, but this value could be tripled as the infringement was determined to be willful.

With no compromise yet reached on a licensing deal to cover the extent of products that Broadcom sells, the company has been methodically attacking Qualcomm's intellectual property base. Both Broadcom and top handset supplier Nokia Corp. (NYSE: NOK) hope to demonstrate legally and in the court of public opinion that they deserve more equal footing with Qualcomm in terms of intellectual property, and should not have to pay significant royalties to Qualcomm.

With the additional leverage, though minor, that Broadcom is achieving through court victories, I wonder at what point it makes sense for Qualcomm to buy Broadcom outright, or conclude some sort of merger. While there may be obstacles or egos in the way, I think Broadcom would be a good compliment to Qualcomm's strategy of becoming more than just a kingpin in the cellular and CDMA markets. Both companies are organized around an elite engineering core with proportionally more advanced degrees in their ranks than many other tech companies, aligning their core R&D centers.

Should the two companies take off their gloves and come to terms of even a strategic partnership, it will go a long way towards helping Qualcomm fend off Nokia and the rest of the industry that wants to dismantle Qualcomm's business and limit its influence in the lucrative wireless markets.

Dave Mock is author of The QUALCOMM Equation and an analyst with Pacific Ridge Capital.