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Altera_Forum's avatar
Altera_Forum
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18 years ago

Alternatives to NIOS

I'm getting a bit frustrated with NIOS and I'd like to consider alternative soft-cores. NIOS seems to be very powerful for OS implementations, but not too efficient for small microcontroller-like app...
Altera_Forum's avatar
Altera_Forum
Icon for Honored Contributor rankHonored Contributor
17 years ago

I've never used Nios II, but from the technical specs it looks quite impressive. I think you'd be hard pressed to find a C programmable core that is significantly better.

That said, the license can be an issue which is why I have my own (GPL'ed) solution: A MIPS compatible 32-bit core (http://thorn.ws/yari). I'd love to see a performance comparison between it and Nios II, but I haven't yet taken the time to do it myself. It certainly won't satisfy the OP as it weighs in at ~ 7k LC, but performance was priority for YARI, not resource consumption.

Regards

Tommy