Hello kilone,
It is not easy to compare a Nios II system with a Pentium CPU. First it is necessary to know that Nios II is only a soft-processor IP for using it in an FPGA design. Beside that IP you can use a lot of others IPs for your design. That could be more other Nios II or DSP algorithms, SDRAM controller, UARTs, etc. Of course a PC Chipset has a much higher clock and is calculating very fast. Normally nobody who is using a Pentium for his application will move to a FPGA.
There are other reasons for using a Soft-Processor (Altera Nios II, Xilinx MicroBlaze, …):
- reconfigurable hardware (very flexible)
- very fast design time (software and hardware)
- very fast algorithms (for example FFT) should be real be realized in real hardware and not a software for the Nios II
- e.g. MULT can be realized in hardware (also embedded multipliers) which needs one or some few clocks
- You can implement more than one Nios II in a FPGA (for example one for TCP/IP and some controlling stuff and another for calculating a slow FFT)
- all IPs (Nios II, DSP algorithms, …) are working parallel and not in a multitask system – that’s why these systems can reach a overall speeds which is impossible for standard CPUs
Bye,
cube007