I've recently developed an interest in implementing projects on top of an FPGA dev board, and wish to purchase one such as the Altera DE1.
Looking in the company's site, I noticed there is another class of FPGAs called "SoC FPGAs" (such as DE1-SoC) which incorporates an ARM core.
How does it differ from a 'regular' FPGA?
Is it less flexible in terms of design?
As you said it has an arm core, they also tend to have a smaller amount of fpga resources compared to a similar price fpga only part.
It's neat that it allows the a direct access to the fpga fabric and if remember right it can also share a DDR interface between arm and fpga section.
It's nice if you need to run part of your application in software like maybe a high level portion of a network processing stack or the control plane for data processing while doing complementary things in hardware.
If you don't need it though you're better off with a dedicated fpga.
