NVIDIA's chief Jen-Hsun Huang said on Thursday that the natural evolution of the company's media and communication processor (MCPs) would become system-on-chip (SOC), which would integrate microprocessor along with input/output capabilities.

Talking about the progress of media and communication processors, that are also referred as South Bridges or I/O controllers, during a question and answer session with Morgan Stanley equity research firm, NVIDIA's CEO and President Jen-Hsun Huang pointed out three major potential implementations of MCPs now and in 2-5 years future.

?The MCP business is going to come in two-three flavours. First of all it is going to come as a discrete platform processor business; that is going to be very related to the PC, whether it's servers, workstation, desktop PCs or notebooks. The second flavour is probably standalone components ?the MCP itself ?evolving into something that is connected to a PCI Express interface; we know that PCI Express can now go both ways, so there is no reason why a future version of an MCP cannot be a standalone networking or storage device, or something like that,?Mr. Huang explained.

Even though NVIDIA Corp. has never released chips for non-graphics add-in cards, e.g., audio cards, there are rumours that the company may release its own audio processor sometime in future.

?The third implementation of the MCP business is going to be SOCs; you are going see us integrating microprocessors and other types of things into MCPs. The MCP is going to change forms and become entire system-on-a-chip,?Mr. Huang said.

Systems-on-chips are used in various devices, such as PDAs, set-top-boxes and various industrial computers, where smaller size is a benefit.

Currently it is unclear, which processor may be incorporated into NVIDIA's MCPs. Usually chip designers like Intel and AMD do not share their architecture peculiarities with others. In contrast, IBM licenses its Power architecture, while Transmeta licenses some of its microprocessor-related technologies.