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I highly recommend the Teensy 4.x with the OctoWS2811 driver. This driver provides 8 channels of parallel output using DMA data transfers to offload the CPU. I think that meets your criterion for "hardware SPI". It doesn't seem like the T4 is overkill for what you're doing, especially if you're using floating point math. The T4 is blazing fast, and I've heard mixed reviews of ESP32 FP performance.
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