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Barely held back by non-disclosure agreements, game developers have expressed some disappointment with the Wii U CPU architecture but have yet to go on the record with firm information on exactly why performance is apparently so lacklustre. The closest we've got so far is Tekken Tag Tournament 2 producer Katsuhiro Harada suggesting that "creative solutions" are required as the CPU clock is "kinda low". Today, a post from Wii and PS3 hacker Marcan puts a firm figure on that, precise to six decimal places no less:"1.243125GHz, exactly. 3 PowerPC 750 type cores (similar to Wii's Broadway, but more cache). GPU core at 549.999755MHz."
Having contributed to the discovery of exploits for the original Wii as part of Team Twiizers, as well as cooperating with other hackers as a member of fail0verflow - the team that brought down PlayStation 3 security - Marcan's figures clearly carry some weight. Asked to clarify how he acquired the information, he declined to go into specifics, but did suggest that it was the result of Wii U hacking rather than revealing leaked information. This comment alone hints that some notable progress has already been made in reverse-engineering Nintendo's new system. Hardware similarities with the older system may well have given hackers a head-start, as low-level Wii exploits have never been released and would probably remain unknown to Nintendo itself.
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