Fpga are great at some things but they are pretty difficult with others. There are many applications where you can use the CPU as the control block while keeping fpga for other reasons. Furthermore keeping the cpu inside the fpga means you get to have direct access to many knobs and settings.
For example I worked on a project that used fpga to mux audio/video. It simply redirected digital pins. However the internal cpu was used to control/decide what to mux, when and how.
It could’ve been all done in fpga but that would’ve been more work (difficult/tricky/inflexible). Instead we had a small core that run a simple program and communicated to external world.
For example I worked on a project that used fpga to mux audio/video. It simply redirected digital pins. However the internal cpu was used to control/decide what to mux, when and how.
It could’ve been all done in fpga but that would’ve been more work (difficult/tricky/inflexible). Instead we had a small core that run a simple program and communicated to external world.