Do you know if this Xilinx kit bundle **broken link removed** includes the Embedded Development kit? The bundle does include the Spartan-3 starter kit, and Xilinx says that
the link you gave points to the "High Volume Starter Kit Bundle(HW-SPAR3-CPLD-DK) Xilinx Development Board" which is actually a Spartan 3 starter kit plus the CPLD design kit. it says nothing about the EDK.
i highly doubt that the EDK would be available with a 99 dollars kit.
The EDK is mentioned in the description of the Spartan3 kit, which is (as it was mentioned) a part of a bundle. **broken link removed** It's in "This product includes" section.
I doubt you'll ever see a PicoBlaze compiler. PicoBlaze code is limited to only 1K words, and it's very hardware intensive and customizeable, not compiler friendly.
Here's a nice free assembler/debugger:
**broken link removed**
Initially I meant the 32bit MicroBlaze. I was hope there is a way to get the EDK for $100 together with a kit. We'll see what Xilinx technical support says on Monday...
As you can see in the picoblaze forum, There is now a simple C compiler available for it and well ... 1024 instructions is a lot. We can do many different tasks with it. Finally 1024 should be extendable easily.
So, picoblaze is really a good tool in my idea when you do not have enough time for a complex microprocessor such as microblaze.
Another important point is available bugs in EDK. Once they killem me in a project. ( The initial release of EDK 7.1)