There are IP available for FPGA and whole toolchains. This is great if you need some specialised processing too slow to be implemented in software, you can add

There are IP available for FPGA and whole toolchains. This is great if you need some specialised processing too slow to be implemented in software, you can add your own cpu instructions or map custom data pipelines to the CPU i/o space. The IP are not too performant, so there are trade offs to consider.