On: Keyboard Latency (2017)

[adolph]

According to iFixIt teardown, Magic Keyboard uses: ST Microelectronics STM32F103VB 72 MHz 32-bit RISC ARM Cortex-M3 [0]

This is a step up from the signal processing power of the HHKB's Renesas M38K07M4 [3] or an MS ergonomic keyboard's NRF24. [1,2]

0. https://www.ifixit.com/Teardown/Magic+Keyboard+Teardown/5099...

1. https://chrispaynter.medium.com/modding-the-microsoft-sculpt...

2. https://www.nordicsemi.com/Products/nRF24-series

3. https://raw.githubusercontent.com/tmk/tmk_keyboard/master/ke...

[ilyt → adolph]

I'd imagine that at minuscule amount of work keyboard needs to do speed of CPU barely matters.

As long as chip has USB builtin (and you're not manually bit-banging usb 1.1 out) it's essentially "fill a buffer, send it to USB controller".

Now if it has to control keyboard and blink a billion of RGB leds, sure, that helps

[markstos → adolph]

You found the specs for the HHKB Pro, not the HHKB Lite 2. The Lite version costs much less, so I don’t assume they share the same chips.

I used the HHKB Lite 2 for about 17 years and had a good experience with it. If there was a latency delay in the hardware, I never noticed.