http://wiiudaily.com/2012/07/tekken-developer-wii-u-cpu-clock-kinda-low/

Given that we are talking about Japanese developers being translated to english, we must be cautious about what they mean.

It's not the same being slow(er) than being weak(er). And as Viper1 has said, if WiiU's CPU can do more per clock than its rivals they can make it slower to keep power consumption low while still being better.

Power7 goes from 2.0-3.2 clock speed.

It's possible to just be the lowest clock possible.

Not quite.

2.4 to 4.25 Ghz.

But your point is still valid.  Could simply be the lower end of the clock range.  And it would have to be given how big and how hot Power7 chips run.

It wouldn't have to be at the lowest possible clock speed ... The relationship between clock speed and energy consumption/heat is an exponential one.

Back 'at the turn of the century' people were building their own home theater PCs and hooking them up to their TVs. Since you needed a relatively powerful system to do this, and these generally ran pretty hot and required fans that were loud people were underclocking and undervolting their systems to reduce power consumption.

http://www.silentpcreview.com/article37-page1.html

Various Undervolted & Underclocked Settings Achieved

By reducing the clock speed by 40% people were able to achieve a (over) 70% reduction in energy consumption.

This act of underclocking a processor is (essentially) what is done to create laptop CPUs, and in laptops they generally run the CPU at (roughly) half the clockspeed of their desktop counterparts. The advantage Nintendo has is they can reduce the number of cores and underclock it to get energy consumption down and. while an 8 core Power7 chips running at 4.25GHz would run far too hot for any console, a 4 core Power7 chip running below 3GHz would probably be appropriate for many consoles.

Sure but we're talking a Power7 chip, not a consumer grade Intel or AMD. Dropping a 49 watt CPU down to 13.8 watts is one thing. Dropping a 200+ watt CPU down to 20-25 watts is another.

Besides, my post was merely pointing out the official clocks from IBM. Certainly a custom chip could be reduced to whatever the client wants.

Not really. The relationship is quadratic with the voltage, it's linear with the speed. Your power consumption grows exponentially because you need to apply much higher vcores to reach a very high frequency, but the most important factor to the power consumption is the vcore. If you keep constant the vcore, a 15% lower frequency grants you ~15% lower power consumption.

I'm not (generally) a hardware expert, but I didn't think there was any point to having a higher vcore besides increasing clock speed. I've always assumed that you change these in tandem.

While I accept that what I said was not strictly correct, I think my point still stands. It is not unreasonable to think that a Power7 processor with 4 (or fewer) cores running at 3GHz (or lower) could be used in a gaming console.

You seem to care about specs. You might want to get one of these.

The problem is, it would make sense for it to be a Power7 chip. Power 7 chips are 45nm and the size of the chip Nintendo plans on using is 45nm. Watson said that it would be Power7 based, and just now all of a sudden IBM is backtracking? Something seems fishy. Broadway is at 90nm right now, to scale it back to 45nm and modernize it wouldn't make much sense at all. I still say it's Power 7 based.

By AMD: "...we can confirm that the Wii U will use AMD graphics but we have not provided any specifics on what silicon they will be using in the upcoming console."

It seems they don't want us to know more than they tell us officially. But their tongues slipped anyway already, whatever they say now, won't invalidate what they already said (as far as IBM is concerned).And in fact it doesn't. They just apply nore "general" terms about what they provided.