[sdvsfqe]

Also, soft cpus without strict performance and power requirements are really easy to implement with modern toolchains. In one quarter you can take an undergraduate who doesn't even know digital design and have them make a cpu core as a final project, and they can make a decent one.

HW is actually really hard. If you can use a soft core to simplify the overall design and suck up a bunch of peripheral logic it's probably a good idea. Then the engineers can spend their time focusing on getting the hard parts of the design correct.