I haven't tried the Atmel AVR yet. Is there a "low-cost" evaluation/development kit offered/available that has an included compiler/assembler. And, if you want to upgrade the compiler that comes with the eval/dev kit is it expensive?

Currently I'm looking for a microcontroller that has lots (~40) GPIO lines and can produce pulse widths approaching (1/32.768MHz) or 30.5175 ns with an included 32-bit data bus. Unfortunately, I think I'm going to be forced to use an FPGA to make this happen because the high end microcontrollers have a feature set that seemingly is not oriented for control but for multimedia and internet applications and the compilers that support the high end devices are expensive.

I've also heard at a seminar that you don't want to use Assembly with ARM microcontrollers unless you're an expert.