Wii U CPU And GPU Specs Allegedly Outed By Hacker


Even though the Wii U has been out in store shelves for over a week now, Nintendo has still kept quiet about what kind of hardware is powering Nintendo’s latest console. Nintendo hasn’t changed their mind about that, sadly, but we may now know a little more about the hardware’s capabilities.

A notable Wii and PlayStation 3 hacker who goes by “Marcan” said that, after testing the hardware, he clocked the Wii U’s CPU at 1.2 GHz–or, to be even more precise, 1.243125 GHz. The CPU reportedly has three PowerPC 750 cores, and that it’s similar in design to Wii’s “Broadway” CPU.

Previously, several developers have gone on record that the Wii U’s CPU is slow, so slow, in fact, that developers are challenged with working around the CPU limitations when porting over existing titles to the new console.

Developers are still learning their way around the new hardware, and, while Marcan insists that the numbers aren’t necessarily as bad as they look, the alleged specs nonetheless presents a possible problem with developing for the Wii U moving forward.

The CPU may not be as good as some would have hoped, but the GPU stands up fairly well against the competition. Reports indicate that the GPU is as fast as PlayStation 3’s and only very slightly slower than the Xbox 360’s.

Battlefield 3: Armored Kill lead designer Gustav Halling recently commented on Twitter (via CVG) that the CPU may hold the Wii U back, especially when put up against Microsoft and Sony’s next console offerings.

“This is also what I been hearing within the industry, too bad since it will shorten its life a lot when new gen starts,” he said.

“GPU and RAM is nice to have shaders/textures loaded. Physics and gameplay run on CPU mostly so player count is affected etc. I don’t actually know what makes it slow, but enough ‘tech’ people I trust in world are saying the same things.”

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