What calculator has the best performing hardware out of all of the calculators on the market?

The HP Prime G2 is the fastest calculator out there, super thin, with a multi-touch screen and solid build quality, while the TI-Nspire CX II CAS is great too but not as fast.

It’s really important to note that while the HP Prime technically has the best hardware of any commercially available graphing calculator, the software experience is not ideal.

The PPL programming language built in (its analog of TI-BASIC) is quite unstable and often causes the calculator to crash entirely instead of just making it return an error code. Your variables in RAM and long term storage aren’t erased after crashes, so that makes the instability of PPL not a total showstopper; but it’s still fairly annoying. If you input anything with a syntax error and try to run it or if you try to press a button you’re not “supposed to”, it’ll let you know that the action is invalid using a yellow-circled exclamation mark at the center of the screen and provide zero further explanation. Not to mention that the symbolic CAS engine and the calc’s internal default numerical computation engine are completely separate, have two different home screens that seemingly inexplicably behave differently for basic operations like using lists, and also for some reason use separate number formats, with the CAS one being susceptible to the same floating point rounding errors that poorly coded android calculator apps are. You’d expect a calculator with 256MB RAM and a processor that rivals that of an early-2010s smartphone to allocate a little more to actually doing correct math easily. This entire machine is a major usability hurdle for newbies and I frankly think HP wasted a lot of potential.

I think you can not just tell that floating point is handled like on a poorly code android calculator without giving some examples, so that I can explain.
FYI, the floating point format used inside the HP Prime CAS is the "double" format (like in any standard programming language) but modified to keep only 48 bits of mantissa instead of 53 (with truncation to 0). Intermediate computations are done using 53 bits. The reason is that 5 bits are used to store the type of the object while keeping objects 64 bits large (the CAS must handle small integers, large integers, fractions, identifiers, polynomials, functions, symbolics, etc.).

In my tests Prime G2 has been fastest, by far, then comes Nspire CX II-T CAS. I don't have other CX II -calculators, so not sure how would they compete. There is some small accuracy things where TI calculators are slightly better than HP, but maybe my tests are just biased, they are not very scientific.

From small manufacturers I have liked SwissMicros DM42n, there it feels like accuracy is way better than anything else and calculator itself is also fast, but I haven't yet done full tests with that since doing some things need programming.

Also Numworks N0120 is great if you don't need CAS stuff, just calculator that does most things with speed, Zero has some potential but they might be in trouble how much they have copied TI OS.

Thank you all! I got an HP Prime G2! (I'm really enjoying it)

I'm curious about what ypu guys think if you only think about pure CAS capabilities. (Ignoring speed) I have some TI-92s and a HP Prime G2, and I've been looking for another CAS engine to experiment with. How does the Casio Classpad 400/500 compare to the nspire CX II CAS? I might just end up getting both, but I was curious about what was preffered.