The Single Board Computer Competition Heats Up
Asus, a very well known manufacturer in the Computer / Laptop market, has made their first step into the world of the single board computer with the Tinker Board. The form factor of this new board looks nearly identical to the Raspberry Pi 3, but the specs of their first release are far from the same. Asus has come out swinging with a quad core 1.8GHz processor, 2GB of RAM, and an impressive GPU capable of 4K H.264 playback. Asus claim it is twice as powerful as the current Pi 3.
The Tinker Board features a powerful Quad Core 1.8GHz ARM Cortex-A17 CPU with an integrated Mali-T764 GPU and 2GB of Dual channel LPDDR3 memory – we can see why they claim double the performance of the Raspberry Pi 3. Other improvements over the Pi 3 include Gigabit Ethernet connectivity and 192KHz / 24 Bit Audio output. Beyond that, the majority of the Tinker Board specs match that of the competing Pi 3, with 4 USB ports, Bluetooth 4.0, integrated WiFi, CSI camera interface, DSI display interface, and a 40 pin GPIO header.
The timing of this release from Asus is particularly interesting – typically we see new Raspberry Pi models released within the coming months. With the Pi Foundation’s 5th birthday coming in just over a month, perhaps they have an answer to this?
Reid Solberg
The particularly compelling thing for me is that Ethernet is implemented natively with the SoC, rather than sharing a single USB 2.0 link with all of the USB ports as in the Pi’s implementation. It also looks like the four USB 2.0 ports will share two host buses on the SoC, allowing for more than double the Pi3’s USB I/O bandwidth.
It will be interesting to see what the RPi foundation announces this year- and how well Asus backs their Tinker Board and associated development community.
Chris @ BCR
Reid, I cannot agree more! The Raspberry Pi Foundation support and community are one of the reasons why the Pi has grown to be what it is.
Technically it isn’t hard to build a decent single board computer. You aren’t going to do it over a weekend… but a small team could throw one together quite quickly. Many have already. The real trick is to have all of the software, support, and community backing – outside of the Raspberry Pi Foundation, none have been successful as of yet.