During the quarterly conference call a couple of days ago NVIDIA’s CFO Marvin Burkett said the company was going to integrate wireless Ethernet (WLAN) controller in the upcoming Media and Communication Processors by the end of the year.

Nowadays the most-advanced and feature-rich NVIDIA’s MCP supports Parallel ATA-33/66/100/133, 6 USB 2.0 ports, 2 x 10/100Mbit/s Ethernet MACs, 3 FireWire (IEEE1394) ports, Dolby Digital decoder as well as PCI and ACR buses. In case NVIDIA implements Wi-Fi in addition to Serial ATA-150 and RAID along with all the previous features, the MCP will be the most advanced I/O controller of 2003. By the end of this year Serial ATA-150 and maybe RAID functionality will be in demand considering their rising popularity at the moment. WLAN prospects are also very bright simply because in future there will be a lot of consumer electronics products to support certain wireless connection protocol

Next steps NVIDIA may take in 2004 or 2005 are USB 3.0, DSL, PCI-Express and 7.1 audio support by MCP.

Later this year NVIDIA plans to launch another version of nForce chipset with advanced DirectX 9.0 supporting graphics core, according to unofficial sources (see this news-story). An obvious shortcoming of all NVIDIA’s core-logic products is that they all are intended for AMD platform which market share is relatively low. Given that most of AMD CPUs are supplied to the cost-effective market, expensive Media and Communication Processors are not usually utilised by mainboard makers who built their products using NVIDIA’s core-logic sets.