Many of the best known IP cores are soft microprocessor designs.

Some systems use many soft microprocessor cores placed on a single FPGA.

Some people have put dozens or hundreds of soft microprocessors on a single FPGA.

A soft microprocessor (also called softcore microprocessor or a soft processor) is a microprocessor core that can be wholly implemented using logic synthesis.

The FPGAs hold the P24 MISC and CPU24 soft microprocessors.

Examples of soft core implementations are soft microprocessors, graphics chips like AGA or Open Graphics Project, harddisc controllers etc.

While many people put exactly one soft microprocessor on a FPGA, a sufficiently large FPGA can hold two or more soft microprocessors, resulting in a multi-core processor.

While there are many different 16 or 32-bit Soft microprocessor IP cores available, eSi-RISC is the only architecture licensed as an IP core that has both 16 and 32-bit implementations.