Wii U CPU and GPU clock speeds revealed; not the end of the world, but not great either
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Though Nintendo first announced its Wii U in April of 2011, and released subsequent console and controller specs up until the console’s release in November of 2012, it never once revealed the specs of the CPU and GPU. Despite whatever that strategy was meant to achieve, industry types and fans alike knew it wouldn’t take very long for someone to figure out the specs, and tear down the console on day one. A teardown doesn’t usually reveal actual clock speeds of the Wii U GPU and GPU, but we knew they’d come sometime shortly after — and now, just two weeks after release, a hacker has done just that.
Hacker Marcan is known for being a part of Team Twiizers, a group that revealed exploits for the original Wii, and he’s also a member of Fail0verflow, the team that revealed the PlayStation 3’s root key. Now, he’ll be known for releasing the Wii U’s CPU and GPU clock speeds, numbers that Nintendo either didn’t want or care to reveal.
Marcan states the Wii U’s tri-core PowerPC 750-alike CPU clocks in at exactly 1.243125GHz. For comparison, the CPUs of the Xbox 360 (also tri-core) and PlayStation 3 run at around 3.0GHz each. The Wii U’s GPU core clocks in at 549.999755MHz, compared to the Xbox 360’s 550MHz GPU. He noted that the CPU was similar to the Wii’s Broadway, but with more cache. Unfortunately, Marcan didn’t provide specifics as to how he obtained the numbers, saying that he’d rather not talk about his methods as of yet. However, he did say that it involved hacks as opposed to leaked information.
Here’s where it may get a little depressing, depending on what you’ve come to expect from Nintendo nowadays. The original Wii’s PowerPC-based Broadway CPU was clocked at 729MHz, and the GPU at 243MHz. Like with the Wii U, Nintendo didn’t release these numbers themselves. So, the Wii U’s CPU clock speed increased by less than double, whereas the GPU increased by a little more than double — numbers that some gamers might not be too thrilled about when they’re packed into what is supposed to be a “next-gen” system. There are three cores in the Wii U CPU, though, as opposed to the single core in the original Wii.
Marcan suggests there’s hope for Nintendo fans salivating for a bigger upgrade in their new console, though. While the Wii U’s CPU clocks in at 1.24GHz and only has one hardware thread per core, he says the console’s power, if used efficiently, could be better than the number suggests. He likened the situation to Intel’s Pentium 4, a powerful though inefficiently designed CPU, which was later phased out with the more efficient Core processors.
He notes that the CPU is an “out of order design,” a more efficient processing method in which the processor can execute instructions based upon available input data, rather than waiting around to complete executions in a specific order. He says the design should “win big” on instructions per cycle, though has “weak” SIMD, which is when multiple processing elements work on different pieces of data at the same time.
Marcan says that though the Wii U’s CPU is “nothing to write home about,” you can’t fairly compare its clock speeds to that of the Xbox 360. Clock speed isn’t everything, and sometimes power is a matter of efficiency, not pure numbers.