Although clockspeed alone is no real measure of performance, we have other known factors that would help shed light on the matter. Clockspeeds of the chip only confirm to us that it is exceptionally slow.Crucially, we have information like the die sizes from anandtech’s teardown and the machine’s power consumption.We know that the CPU then is really small built on 45nm, no bigger than 360’s CPU and definitely smaller than PS3’s. In context PS3’s CPU is small(234m transistors) compared to a modern dual core chip, even a Pentium G630 is over 500 million transistors, around half of that is cache.”My Quad Core i5 runs at a lowers clock speed than my previous Core 2 Quad Q6600 but it outperforms it by near 3 times while using less electricity to do it.”The reason for this is not magic, it is just a sandy bridge i5 quad core has MORE than DOUBLE the number of transistors as a Core 2 Q6600. (by the way, all these chips have higher clocks than Q6600 too) It is made on a more advanced process so the transistors it has are smaller and allows further optimal design. However if you made them on the same process size, the i5 chip will be much, much larger.As we know the process size and die size of Wii U’s CPU, then it is plainly not chock full of transistors that small. The only thing that was going to save Wii U’s CPU here then was having a really fast clockspeed like over 4ghz. But looking at the power consumption it was fairly clear this wasn’t gonna be happening.We know the architecture is old, we know the die is not very big, we know the power consumption is low. Even before we knew the clockspeeds, we knew then this was not a fast CPU and all this does is confirm low clockspeeds too.Because of the wide array of factors now known, clockspeed as well, there can be no denying how slow the CPU is. Its very small, its based on old architecture, its low power, and its low clockspeeds.
See the rest here: Wii U CPU and GPU Clock Speeds revealed, slower than PS3/360
