Nintendo recently addressed rumors about the Wii U’s CPU being “weak”. Some developers in the past have spoken out against the CPU and its low clock speed. If you remember a famed hacker named Marcan discovered that the Wii U CPU is clocked at 1.24Ghz in Wii mode and has three cores.
Nintendo doesn’t believe their CPU is weak at all. Of course they wouldn’t but their answer to this accusation is pretty logical. Nintendo’s Hiroshi Takeda stated that he doesn’t think the CPU is weak. He says ‘it is not true’ that the CPU is weak.
He acknowledges that the GPU is more ‘pronounced’ than the CPU in that it is carries more of the work load. Takeda stresses that the current trend in gaming hardware is that the amount of memory (RAM) keeps getting bigger and that CPUs aren’t getting more powerful. He repeats that the CPU ‘is not underpowered’ and wraps up his comments on the subject by saying the design of the console and CPU just ‘stress the memory’ more than anything else.
I do think he’s right in that the pure clock speed of CPUs in the gaming console aren’t going to be as high as some would think. Most rumors peg the next consoles from Sony and Microsoft as having 1.6Ghz eight-core CPUs. I don’t think we’ll see anything near the 3.2Ghz seen in the PS3/360.
So what do you think of Takeda’s comments?
Thanks to NeoGAF for translation help.
