Santa Clara (CA) - Following AMD, Intel will include "no execute" (NX) security technology in its Prescott microprocessors later this year. The company hopes that NX will significantly decrease the threats of worms and viruses to PCs.

Speaking at Intels Spring analyst meeting, president and chief operating officer Paul Otellini, said that the current desktop Pentium 4 processors "Prescott" will be the first product in Intels product line-up to offer the new security technology. NX is widely considered to be a to defend PCs against common attack strategies of hackers.

The NX feature, which currently already is available in AMD's Athlon 64 and Opteron chips, is designed to protect the system against buffer overflow attacks. Buffer overflow attacks flood the computer's buffer memory before targeting it with malicious code which then can be executed by the processor. According to AMD and Intel, NX is able to detect such attacks. Buffer overflow strategies were used by the MS Balster and Code Red worms, for example.

NX requires the operating system to support the technology in order to function properly. Microsoft will add the NX feature with the SP2 for Windows XP, which is expected later this year.