Remember the days when your idiot friends would argue with you in the schoolyard about how "blast processing" made the Sega Genesis a better system than the Super Nintendo? Or how the Nintendo 64 was twice as good as the Sony PlayStation because it had twice as many "bits"? Or how the Wii's processor was no better than "two GameCubes stuck together"? Here in our new, enlightened age, I thought we had left such context-free numbers games behind like so many other childish arguments.

But no, in 2012 people are apparently still obsessing over how a single spec number makes one console wholly better or worse than another. Today's bit of myopic number-crunching is based on the findings of Wii hacker (and now purported Wii U hacker) Hector Martin, who last night tweeted claims that he had discovered the previously unknown clock speeds for the Wii U's tri-core PowerPC 750 processor (about 1.24GHz) and the AMD Radeon-based GPU (about 550MHz).

The Wii U's CPU clock speed number is indeed lower than the Xbox 360's 3.2GHz clock (although the 360's gets halved to a functional 1.6GHz when multithreading) or the PS3's 4GHz clock. The GPU clock speeds are more comparable across the PS3, the Xbox 360, and the Wii U. Still, plenty of reporters jumped on that fact as undeniable evidence that the Wii U hardware is actually inferior to that of consoles that came out years ago.

"For the most part, this means that the Wii U is under-powered compared to the seven-year-old Xbox 360 and the six-year-old PS3," VentureBeat wrote of the clock speed finding (with a few caveats). "One would have at least hoped for tech that surpassed current consoles, even if only by a small margin," a Forbes writer declared. "I honestly can’t believe what I’m reading here," a GamingBolt writer hyperventilated. Discussions on countless message boards and online forums are even more hyperbolic concerning the importance of the clock speed comparison.

Of course, comparing two consoles with vastly different architectures and internal chips is not nearly as simple as just seeing which one has the higher clock speed. Things like the number of computer instructions per clock cycle, the bandwidth of the RAM bus, and the overall efficiency of the architecture are at least as important as the raw clock speed at which a processor runs.

So how does the Wii U measure up when all that is taken into account? It's a bit unclear. In further tweets, Martin suggests that comparing the Wii U to older HD systems is like comparing a Pentium 4 to a Pentium 3. While the Pentium 4 was capable of much higher clock speeds than its predecessor, the Pentium 3 was much more efficient when running at the same clock speed.

Similarly, the Wii U's support for out-of-order execution and its shorter pipeline lets it operate more efficiently, doing more per clock cycle than systems like the PS3 and Xbox 360, Martin says. Then again, Martin also points to a lack of hardware threading and "weak SIMD" on the Wii U that hurt that relative clock-to-clock performance.

Rather than comparing numbers, though, it's sometimes better to just see how two systems handle the processing required for the same game. On that score, my basic tests of the console using a bunch of Wii U ports found them to be graphically indistinguishable from the PS3 and Xbox 360 games they were based on, with comparable fidelity and smoothness. More detailed examinations of the Wii U's launch ports found graphical performance that was comparable to that of other systems, though not really improved over the previous versions. Those examinations suggest that the Wii U's relatively beefy (for a console) 1GB of game RAM and powerful graphics processor are being held back by a relatively weak CPU and slow RAM bus, creating a system that is basically the processing equal of the PS3 and Xbox 360, thus far.

Of course, these are launch-day ports of games originally designed for other systems, so rushed developers may not have had the time to devote to substantially tuning and improving the performance for the Wii U hardware. In general, graphical fidelity and observable performance of a system's games only improves as the system gets older and developers get a better handle of how to best tailor their games to its specific hardware.

Still, it doesn't speak well of the Wii U's processing power that we have yet to see a game that really performs markedly better than anything we've seen on other current consoles. If the system can't manage that feat, it risks being quickly overshadowed by much more powerful hardware expected from Sony and Microsoft in the next year or so.

Regardless, one thing is clear in all of this: those pointing to clock speed as the end-all, be-all proof that the Wii U is not powerful enough are not considering the whole picture. As Martin himself tweeted, "So yes, the Wii U CPU is nothing to write home about, but don't compare it clock per clock with a 360 and claim it's much worse. It isn't."

Andrew Cunningham contributed to this report.