ASUS Tinker Board to Compete Against Raspberry Pi 3
Ron Perillo / 8 years ago
Motherboard giant ASUS is taking aim directly against Raspberry PI 3 for dominance in the DIY computing market with their newly announced Tinker Board. Equipped with a Rockchip RK3288 System-on-chip running at 1.8GHz with 2GB of RAM, ASUS claims a superior performance over the Raspberry PI 3 Model B which utilizes a Broadcoam BCM2837 1.2GHz SoC paired with 1GB of system RAM. Head-to-head, ASUS claims a Geekbench score of 3925 vs 2092 which is almost twice as fast. ASUS also beefed up all other onboard hardware in comparison to the Raspberry PI 3 including Gigabit NIC vs 100M LAN as well as HD audio support for 192KHz/24-bit sample rate vs 48KHz/16-bit. Like Raspeberry PI, it also officially supports Debian Linux and adds KODI support.
The ASUS Tinker board measures 8.5cm x 5.6cm with a 40-pin GPIO header and similar layout to a Raspberry PI. There are four USB 2.0 ports, a 3.5mm audio jack connection and an HDMI 2.0 port supporting 4K displays. In terms of pricing, it is currently available for £55.00 with VAT included. In comparison, a Raspberry PI 3 Model B can be had for £33.98 with VAT. That is not a bad value considering the performance, but ultimately the DIY market is not like a gaming or desktop PC so brute force will not necessarily guarantee success and adoption. The ASUS Tinker Board will be launched in North America soon on January 30, 2017.
Specifications:
- Quad core 1.8GHz ARM Cortex-A17 CPU
- 2GB Dual channel LPDDR3 memory
- Gigabit LAN and Bluetooth 4.0 + EDR connectivity
- 802.11 b/g/n Wi-Fi
- 4x USB 2.0 ports
- 40-pin Internal header with 28 GPIO pins
- Contact points for PWM and S/PDIF signals
- 1x 3.5mm Audio jack connection
- CSI port for camera connection
- DSI port supporting HD resolution
- 1x HDMI 2.0 port to support 4K resolution
- Micro SD port supports UHS-I
- Supports Debian OS with KODI
- Power supply: 5V/ 2A Micro USB (not included)
