Key features on Stratix II

Ignoring the title of the thread;

1. No.

2. No.

3. Yes.

On item 2, I recall going to a Xilinx seminar hosted by Insight Electronics I believe, where they had a factory marketing person presenting. He was asked if Xilinx would ever be placing the PCI core in a hard block in the FPGA, like ACTEL was offering at the time. His reply was a solid NO, as they had felt that having a hard macro frozen at a particular revision of the PCI spec. was a losing proposition and were fully committed to keeping the IP in FPGA fabric to allow for continued flexibility for the user.

On items 3, I believe that Altera offered the ARM processor in the Excalibar line at one time. Here again, while it seems nice to offer a higher performance processor directly in the FPGA fabric, practical limitations in terms of wrapping the rest of the infrastructure about the hard IP can result in various challenges that effect overall system performance.

I hope this answers your questions as asked above.

I hope this also fosters additional dialogue from others for their viewpoints.