Why does the Early Power Estimator (EPE) for transceiver based devices allow me to enter more user I/O pins than the number of pins listed in respective device handbook?

Description

The EPE for transceiver based devices has an I/O count based on general purpose I/O (GPIO) and transceiver (HSSI) pins combined.

This is done to make the EPE consistent with the Quartus® II software compilation report for “Total pins”.  The device handbooks have seperate pin counts for HSSI pins and general purpose I/O pins.

For clarity, a tooltip will be added to future versions of the EPE indicating the number of I/O pins includes both HSSI and general purpose I/O pins.