@Gabriel Gallardo: Figuring out what data are supposed to be going back and forth to the SPI is tricky, because the VexRISC does have a tiny instruction cache, and will read a handful of addresses in a burst, aligned to some boundary like 4 or 8 bytes and not necessarily at the jump address, and if a loop is very small it might fit into the instruction cache and you'll see nothing accessing the SPI flash for a period of time. As for the startup:

blink.c

starts with a GPIO programming stage which takes rather long because it is bit-banging the whole serial programming chain. That's followed by a message output at the leisurely rate of 9600 baud until it settles into the blink mode. But the blink mode is supposed to be several Hz, not several hundred Hz. At several hundred Hz you get an LED that blinks faster than your eye can track, so you just see that the LED is on. FYI: After testing a number of chips, we decided that the best yield of working parts occurred at an internal digital power supply voltage of about 1.6V, so we dropped the LDO output on the boards slightly, which is why you don't see 1.8V.