d100's Large Scale Integrated Circuit design?

Just ran across this old article on the D100:
http://www.newsandtech.com/issues/2002/04-02/pt/04-02_nikon.htm
which says:
==

The D100’s new one-chip system, Large Scale Integrated Circuit, provides fast image processing while keeping power consumption to a minimum
==

I've never seen a reference to this before. This article appears to be based on an interview with Richard LoPinto, vice president for SLR Camera Systems at Nikon.

Could ithis highly integrated, one-chip system make it difficult or not economical to fix a flaw in the JPG system that is resulting in excessively soft images out of the box?

Nefrodite said:

The D100’s new one-chip system, Large Scale Integrated Circuit, provides fast
image processing while keeping power consumption to a minimum

Click to expand...

This sounds like marketting speak for, "We were trying to keep the costs down and only put in one CPU/DSP instead of the 3 we have in the D1x/h." Almost all chips today are considered VLSI (very large scale integration) parts. Nikon may have moved some of the glue logic onto the main CPU/DSP die, but it's no big deal. The low power claim also sounds like marketting speak for, "Uh, we're not high performance, so we must be low power!"

I sure don't find "soft" images coming out of my D100.