I reads the same way I ran it the first time. Clock speed is mostly insignificant now. Has been since intel  core series took off.  You can find many quad core processors running at 3 Ghz but none of them have the same peformance.

The most important thing is the tech under the hood and the cache speed, not the clock speed. Yes, it still makes some difference but not enough to mak ea serious difference. An AMD Athlon dual core clocked at a higher speed than a core 2 duo will underperform it in every category while using more energy to do it.

So you are saying that if the Wii U CPU was running at 1Ghz it wouldn't matter as it's a Power 7 bassed chip? Sorry but that is wrong, there are other factors that determin performance but clock speed is still a major factor in CPU performance. Yes CPUs have spent a long time sitting at ~3Ghz as that has been a bit of a wall in cilicone bassed CPUs and that has lead to other developments such as adding more cores (Wii U has 3 same as Xenon) prefetch and instruction set and other architecture advancements. But clock speed is still a major factor in performance and a more modern can still be slower than an older one even with all the architecture advancement if it's clock speed is to low.

To use a more apt example lets compare Intel's Nehelem vs the superior architecture Sandybridge, now per clock SandyBridge wipes the floor with Nehalem yet an older Nehelem CPU at 3.2GHz is still much more poerful than a Sandy Bridge CPU with the same number of cores at 2Ghz. You see without knowing the clock speed of the newer CPU you can't claim it's faster than the older one even if at the same clock speed the newer one would be faster. 

So yes we do need to know the Wii U's clock speeds before we can say how powerful it is. 

Have you ever heard of the fallacy of straw men?

Yes, just because I used a example to show how your argument was wrong does not make my argument a strawman. If anything your argument that clock speed is irrelevent is the strawman.

The fact is we need to know clock speeds (or raw performance numbers I guess) to know how powerful the system is. I don't know how you are still argueing. 

Are neither of you capable of seeing that you're arguing over two different things?

lilbroex is talking about comparing two chips of vaguely similar clock speeds - say, 2.5 GHz vs 3 GHz. In most cases, that clock speed doesn't really inform anybody as to the power of the system, outside of direct comparisons between two otherwise-identical chips. Even if there's just one small added ability to the new chip, it could bridge the gap in clock speed.

zarx is talking about comparing chips of significantly different clock speeds, something that lilbroex didn't explicitly rule out, but clearly wasn't talking about. When the clock speeds are noticeably different, other changes might not be enough to make up the difference.

In the end, I think lilbroex's actual point is that, while we might get a slightly better idea of how powerful the system is by knowing the clock speed, in the end it's not going to be enough information to settle anything regarding the arguments. And I think zarx's argument is that we will get a better idea of how powerful it is. In other words, you're arguing two sides of the same coin.

Early signs, it looks like it is what the DC was to the PS2/Xbox/GC. For me that's pretty excellent! That's all I ask from Nintendo. I honestly don't think graphics will have the usual generation jump, and personally ain't a graphics whore so doesn't matter that much as long as it doesn't end up being What Wii was to PS3/360.

I got the impression he was argueing that the clock rate was irrelevent to how powerful the system was. Hence when he said "Clock speeds wouldn't make much differences anyway and haven't for nearly 10 years" which is just wrong. 

We can't know how powerful the system is until we know all the factors and my arguement has always been without a key peice of information the other information doesn't really mean anything, just like knowing the clock speed and not knowing the othe aspects such as architecture and number of cores would be useless for figuering out how powerful the system is. 

i think specs are really good, not sure what PS4/Xbox3 will have but i think Iwata is right that anything above this point is too expensive

good job Ninty : )

now get us GTA V and we need nothing more!

Nope. A proprietary one.

Ah, so it's Nintenduct tape?