Yes, the Xbox 360's barely been on the market for a year and the PlayStation 3 and Wii have not yet hit store shelves, but within the R&D departments at Sony, Microsoft and Nintendo it's never too early to start planning for the next next-generation platforms.

Microsoft in particular has publicly revealed that it's already thinking about its next console. While the company has long been known as a software powerhouse, Microsoft may start making more and more of its own hardware, especially chips, according to a new report in The New York Times.

Microsoft has a long history of teaming up with leading chip maker Intel. In fact, the two have been so closely tied that their pairing (Windows + Intel processors) has been dubbed "Wintel." And when Microsoft decided to enter the video game console business in 2001, it came as no surprise that the company used an Intel processor in its original Xbox. For the current Xbox 360, Microsoft decided to use an IBM PowerPC-based design for the CPU.

Going forward, however, Microsoft is apparently considering making its own chips. The company has started a new project tentatively called the Computer Architecture Group. According to the NYT report, Microsoft's design effort will initially be split between research labs at the headquarters in Redmond, Washington, and its Silicon Valley campus. Charles P. Thacker, a veteran engineer who helped out on the Xbox 360 project when a key engineer became ill, will head the Silicon Valley group.

Thacker noted that one of the reasons Microsoft is doing this is that the company "needs to begin thinking about the next-generation design of its Xbox game console." Thacker also pointed out that voice recognition technology will also play a big role in the research.

And if Microsoft seriously gets involved in chip making, it'll likely stick to it guns. "Like everything that Microsoft gets into, we're in it for the long run," Thacker said.

You can check out the full NYT article here.