However, as far as chip architecture and clock speeds are concerned, the specs seem to be a bit underwhelming.
Hacker Marcan claims to have identified the clock speed and some characteristics of the CPU. Apparently, Nintendo uses a variant of the IBM PowerPC 750 processor with three cores and a clock speed of 1.243125 GHz per core. The Wii had a PowerPC 750CL processor running at 729 MHz. The Wii U's graphics clock is 549.999755 MHz. The Wii's Hollywood GPU was clocked at 243 MHz.
We know that clock speed isn't everything in performance, and the specs somewhat correspond to developer claims -- though some of which are apparently already hitting their limits. Still, the clock speeds are substantially below the rival processors, as the PS3′s Cell CPU and the Xbox 360′s Xenon chip are clocked at over 3 GHz per core. The graphics chip in the Xbox 360 runs at 500 MHz, while the PS3's GPU is clocked at 550 MHz.
However, the Wii U's CPU and GPU appear to have written compromise all over them and support the speculation that Nintendo simply needed to counter Microsoft's Kinect quickly and did not have enough time to engineer an entirely new hardware foundation. According to VentureBeat, one of the major compromises in the Wii U is that the console does not support two tablets running at the same time and when it does, it will have to scale back the frame rate of the game that is played.
