It's not likely to be a Power7 based CPU, people tend to be a little confused in the difference between a Power7 CPU and a POWER (note the capitals) series chip. Both the Power7 and PowerPC lines are POWER (Performance Optimisation With Enhanced RISC) series chips, it's more likely to be a PowerPC chip of some description imo.

Some people are also under the misaprehension that a lower clockspeed means that the U's CPU is less powerful than the Cell and Xenon which, given the more modern architecture and superior cache, is nonsense. The only thing that the Cell and Xenon will outperform the U's CPU with is floating point operations, but the same can probably be said of the CPUs in the PS4 and 720 too. All 3 consoles next gen are sharing a similar architecture in that a great deal of the grunt work done by CPUs this gen is going to be done by GPGPUs which are better suited to the task.

So, no DX11 support... glad we got that cleared up.

I think were the Wii U will be in trouble, is the physics department.

Not only the processor bottlenecks the whole architecture of the console, people say, it also needs to stream stuff to the gamepad.

I see it struggling on a future heavy AI game, cloth physics and environment interactivity.

Why would it struggle with physics? A lot of that stuff can be done on the GPU anyway (like nVidia's PhysX implementation on nVidia GPUs) and the CPU is almost certainly more powerful then PS3 & 360s. Furthermore, the Cell and Xenon were reported to be bottlenecked by the lack of RAM and the all reports suggest games will have at least 1Gb available for games.

No IBM came right out and said that the Wii U's chip will be based on the Power 7 CPU that was in Watson. And I doubt that IBM would mix up its own products.

http://gizmodo.com/5809629/wii-us-ibm+made-processor-has-watson-supercomputer-dna-in-it

http://www.zdnet.com/blog/open-source/what-makes-ibms-watson-run/8208

It highly depends in wich rumor you belive. The first ones pointed for a 4850 card that is from the r7xxx series, some of the latest one like the ubsifot leak pointed for an update with 6770 wich is from the Nrthern islands if i recall correctly. They have similar performances in raw power but the letest has acces to dx11 features. Both of these looks possible so cant really favor one or another.

For now it looks pretty believeable

It'll have a DX11 equivalent feature set, but as has already been mentioned Microsoft own the DirectX API and they're not sharing lol. Everything a programmer can do with DX11 will be possible on the U's GPGPU.

It won't have problems with physics, as someone has mentioned above the GPU will handle physics quite comfortably.

And as far as streaming stuff to the GamePad goes the 3MB cache on the CPU and 32MB cache on the GPU in the form of eDRAM will prevent issues with bottlenecks.

Nintendo have been (surprisingly) forward thinking in their hardware choices.

Well I take back what I said regarding the CPU then.

Hope you guys know what you're saying.

I'm still puzzled what is it the console doesn't have for Epic no to support Unreal Engine 4 on it.

Not sure... maybe the tessellator (is that the right word?) is an older model and can't be pushed as far as Epic would like? That's the only thing I can think of considering most next-gen engines seem to push tessellation.

I have no idea either tbh, just guessing.