AntiCheat software is now common place in competitive gaming, with the numerous online leagues developing AC clients to prevent the players from cheating

New research at Intel is looking towards a hardware system which would help prevent cheating, which could put an end to aimbots forever

This "anti-cheat technology" was presented at Research-at-Intel Day 2007, and is actually a feature that would be built into Intel chips.

The purpose of this system would be to monitor mouse and keyboard input, as well as input that the computer was sending to the game server, allowing it to work out of there is any software (i.e. a cheat) which is artificially playing for the person

As this is hard-coded into the chip, it would be far harder, if not imposibble, to bypass it than a normal AC. As well as preventing cheats such as aimbots in FPS games, it could have many other uses, from preventing bots on MMORPGs such as WoW and runescape, to preventing certain types of virus / spyware from using the computer as a host.

There is still a lot of work for Intel on this project, so don't expect to see these products in the shops tomorrow, but it will be very interesting to see what effect this would have on the gaming community, assuming Intel do get to the stage of producing these products, and whether there may even come a time where leagues make it compulsary to use this hardware, which would be a huge blow to companies such as AMD