soft ip processors? history? advantages? vs ucontroller?

[umairsiddiqui]

Sir,
Soft IP Processors (my questions is from fpga prospective not from asic) have made strong hold in market, several vendors like Xilinx(Picoblaze & Microblaze), Altera(NIOS and NIOS-II) are making them. please do me a favor, I require some documents (articles, essays, whitepapers etc) related to history of these soft ip processors, (list of) current applications and advocacy of "soft ip processors vs microcontrollers".
please provide your own essays etc or links to other such documents or e-mail me if appropriate.
Additionally what is your opinion and experience for using soft ip processors?in what applications you have tried?any advantage/disadvantage of soft ip processors?

 

[eltonjohn]

I don't have the DOCUMENTS ..but i can help with the other part .. Processors IP's develloped from the SOC methodology .. 5 years ago! .. Companies like Triscend started Embedding CPU cores with FPGA resources on one chip. This gives a TREMENDOUS potential to the designer . Now he can do all his SPECIFIC logic design in logic and control it from the same chip .. The reduction on REAL STATE is BIG !.. So monster companies like XILINX and ALTERA all of the sudden were out of touch with this NEW CONCEPT .They responded with 2 years of delay with their own VERSION of SoC .. instead of embedding a CPU core along with the FPGA ..
well it seems that FPGA are big enough to devote half of the chip to synthesize a SOFT processor .They optimize the real state with a specially crafted CPU for their family of FPGA .. this gave them enough time to RESPOND an develop the Triscend equivalent .. VIRTEX2 PRO families .This time the went overboard and put even several real CPU core .. In the mean time TRISCEND went away .. XILINX bought it .. And kill it ! see http://www.triscend.com/companyinfo/
And XILINX appears one more time like the real INNOVATOR! .. with several SOLUTIONS ..Soft IP Cpu cores and real cpu CORES products .. !
Altera follow the path ..they also replied with their own version of OPTIMIZED soft IP cpu ...