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the exalibur (or something like that) used to have an embed processor
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That was Excalibur ARM around 2001. That device family had dedicated silicon for an ARM processor and some peripherals combined with FPGA fabric using the APEX architecture.
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contras:
- thakes long time(15 to 1h) to compile the "hardware" ( full blown niosII system)
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The compilation time added by the soft microprocessor itself isn't much compared to the compilation time for other functions typically in FPGA designs. The compilation time for the complete SOPC Builder system including its peripherals depends heavily on how large the SOPC Builder system is. The compilation time ranges from very fast to very long. At least with SOPC Builder and Nios, the system can have only the peripherals required for the specific design (part of the "very customizeble" pro listed by mirimon).
In addition to the Nios II soft CPU, Altera devices support the ARM Cortex-M1 soft core. See
http://www.altera.com/products/ip/processors/32_16bit/m-arm-cortex-m1.html.
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