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Last week Intel raised a lot of eyebrows in the tech world by shelling out a whopping $8 billion for antivirus firm McAfee.

Many wondered whether spending such a significant sum on a bit of BIOS code was really a wise move for the chipmaker, but with Intel’s aspirations in the mobile space other analysts saw a method to the madness.

The move, some say, may even serve to propel Intel beyond the competition in both its traditional PC market and the fast emerging growth market of mobile smart devices where it currently holds precious few advantages against its ARM rival.

“Intel is ramping up quickly in the security realm, as it correctly recognizes that devices are increasingly complex and connected and increasingly unsafe and insecure,” explained analyst Jack Gold.

Indeed, in the press release announcing the move, Intel made much of the fact it believed security to be “the third pillar of computing” – as if other firms without an AV component would soon feel the roof crashing in on them.

And while some posited that the McAfee purchase was simply Intel’s way of continuing its questionable bundling practices in a legally untouchable way, others pointed to the fact McAfee was a company in flux, moving in a much more mobile direction after its recent purchase of tenCube and Trust Digital. Both firms cater to the mobile market, with tenCube providing LoJack-like services to both mobile consumers and business users, whilst Trust Digital (TD), says Gold, provides security enhancements for inherently insecure smart devices such as the iPhone and Android phones.

TD also boasts that its Orchestrator product line is already used by a plethora of enterprise customers to fully manage and automate security for the increasing number of end user selected “user liable” devices organizations need to enable onto the corporate network, despite potentially insufficient security capabilities.

This smart push into the mobile market has made McAfee a much more desirable choice to Intel than larger security software rival Symantec, which still limits itself mainly to the PC space.

Intel, despite its continued and increasing revenues from the space, appears to want to shake off the image of being a PC chip company only, and McAfee could well be the differentiator Intel’s chips need to gain appeal in the ever popular world of mobile computing.

With new operating systems emerging every Tuesday and Thursday – Android, Symbian, MeeGO, Chrome, Bada, Brew and Windows Phone 7 to name but a few – the need to secure mobile data in a uniform and IT department friendly way, is becoming paramount.

Also, bearing in mind that mobile shipments are due to outnumber PC sales by 10 to 1 in the near future, any PC company not jumping on the mobile bandwagon is truly missing the boat.

Then, of course, there’s the issue of Intel and Nokia’s MeeGo, which many in the press have cruelly dubbed “NoGo.”

“McAfee, concentrating on MeeGo, could provide Intel with a competitive edge against the other OSes,” posits Gold, but added that Intel had to enable enhanced security protection for all of the various OS platforms to fully expand its chip market.

“This is especially critical for Atom which is directly targeted at the device marketplace,” he added.

Is it all worth $7.7 billion though? Gold believes that while the price is high and Intel may have paid too much for the company, it was still a good buy because aside from significantly adding to Intel’s security portfolio in both the mobile and PC space, McAfee is also a profitable company in its own right.

“The revenues and profitability are good for Intel’s bottom line, but what Intel also gets is the ability to ‘tune’ the security capabilities of the McAfee products to run faster/better on Intel platforms and to provide chip-level optimization ‘hooks’,” explained Gold.

This, he posited, would give Intel the ability to couple optimized software with hardware capabilities “to make things work much better with burdened system resources than currently available sluggish security overlays.”

The bottom line is, with Intel’s Atom squaring up against ARM’s architecture to compete in the smartphone and tablet space, security optimization for Atom devices could offer compelling advantages, something Intel sorely needs to finally crack the tough telco nut.