Nios II Classic Processor Reference Guide

ID 683620
Date 10/28/2016
Public
Document Table of Contents

6. Nios® II Processor Versions

Each release of the Nios® II Embedded Design Suite (EDS) introduces improvements to the Nios® II processor, the software development tools, or both. This chapter catalogs the history of revisions to the Nios® II processor; it does not track revisions to development tools, such as the Nios® II Software Build Tools (SBT).

Improvements to the Nios® II processor might affect:

  • Features of the Nios® II architecture—An example of an architecture revision is adding instructions to support floating-point arithmetic.
  • Implementation of a specific Nios® II core—An example of a core revision is increasing the maximum possible size of the data cache memory for the Nios® II/f core.
  • Features of the JTAG debug module—An example of a JTAG debug module revision is adding an additional trigger input to the JTAG debug module, allowing it to halt processor execution on a new type of trigger event.

Intel FPGA implements Nios® II revisions such that code written for an existing Nios® II core also works on future revisions of the same core.