There was an alternate rumour that the Wii U would be capable of Samaritan at 720p, though that might have just been a second-order followup of that first AMD engineer thing. Samaritan at 720p would require ~1.1 TFLOPS (assuming that it scales down linearly from the stated 2.5 TFLOPS requirement of the demo at 1080p).
However, it is really important to note the cpu thing. If you're coding close to the metal on the Xbox 360, its 3-core cpu would yield higher performance than if you did a blind recompile without putting any effort into the hardware on the Wii U, given the rumours of its more powerful albeit still 3-core cpu. I personally believe that this is a major factor in most of the assertions claiming that the Xbox 360 seems to sometimes have higher performance.
I also think that there will be no consoles that have astonishingly higher cpu-dependent performance compared to the Xbox 360. I mean, is it even worth it from a heat dissipation standpoint to put in a six- or eight- core processor when you can use that extra temperature buffer to up the gpu, which is considered vastly more important in game performance?*
* I'm not being an apologist nearly as much as this paragraph makes it seem
Good point.
We know the Wii U will be a more powerful hardware, and if we believe insider points from poster like wsippel (whom I have no reason to doubt at all) then the CPU is even better (faster, in some ways much faster) than Xenon.
I think that is telling and, given what you noted that I bolded, it would seem Nintendo is targetting something balanced with a CPU like that.
Optimizations are key as well, as blu noted earlier that it doesn't matter how powerful hardware is, if its optimized poorly, it will run poorly.
To me, this fits with a console that is "beyond the current generation but not leap-frogging it"
And, as long as the GPU is capable of handling games that would appear on a "much" more powerful PS4 and/or 720, then Nintendo is aiming in the right direction.
I'm of the belief Nintendo knows how to strike the right balance, and will make competent hardware.
As always, it will be up to Nintendo to show off what the system is truly capable of.
I also believe we should not expect third party games that had the 360 as the lead platform to be much prettier on the Wii U; we know the Wii U will be used to port games so I'd expect games to be ports and nothing more, outside of "ground-up" build titles.
