The Cyclone® III architecture will support the Nios® II embedded soft processor. The Nios® II processor can achieve as much as 160 DMIPS of performance, and allow the user to build custom instructions as well as stitch together a custom set of peripherals using the Avalon Interconnect Fabric. Avalon is not a bus, it’s an interconnect, so it doesn’t introduce potential latency issues, as other on-chip bus solutions can.