The senior hardware development director at Nintendo has recently defended the company's choice of CPU for the Wii U.

In November, a hardware hacker published the Wii U processor and graphics card specs, revealing that the CPU carries a clock speed of 1.24 GHz.

At half the speed of six year-old systems like the PS3 and Xbox 360, the Wii U's clock speed became the subject of criticisms.

But, speaking at a investor meeting last week, Nintendo's R&D director Genyo Takeda insisted the hardware "does not deserve the negative feedback."

Takeda said that the Wii U combines "low power consumption and a fairly high performance".

These comments were in response to a question from an audience member who said the processor was weaker than other parts of the device.

"Regarding your comment that we focus on the GPU and that the CPU is a little poor, we have a different view," Takeda said.

"It depends on how to evaluate a processing unit. In terms of die size [area a chip occupies], the GPU certainly occupies a much larger space than the CPU.

"As you can see CPUs used for the latest PCs and servers, however, it is usual for current CPUs that the logic part for actual calculations is really small and that the cache memory called SRAM around it covers a large area. From this angle, we don't think that the performance of the Wii U's CPU is worse than that of the GPU."

Nintendo design guru Shigeru Miyamoto said it wanted "to immediately communicate the Wii U's value, but could not". The company's development teams are resisting the distraction of the Wii U's disappointing sales performance.