ASUS are the latest company to enter in the single board computer space with their latest product called the Tinker board. The tinker board has a similar form factor to the Raspberry Pi with the GPIO pins placed in the same place and having the same configuration as well.
At first glance the hardware looks slightly more powerful than the RAspberry Pi, lets take a look at the specs
- CPU: Rockchip RK3288 – Quad core 1.8 GHz ARM Cortex-A17 (32-bit)
- GPU: 600MHz Mali-T764 GPU
- RAM: 2GB dual channel LPDDR3
- Storage: removable MicroSD slot ( supporting SD 3.0 )
- Display Output: full size HDMI 1.4
- Audio port: 3.5 mm audio jack ( supporting line out and microphone in )
- Audio Playback: 192k/24bit sample rate
- GPIO: 40-pin header with 28 GPIO pins
- Ethernet: Gigabit LAN ( not shared with USB bus )
- Wireless: Bluetooth 4.0, 802.11 b/g/n Wi-Fi, with IPEX antenna header
- USB: four USB 2.0 ports
- video input: MIPI-CSI camera
- video output: MIPI-DSI, compatible with the Raspberry Pi 7″ display and others
- Power input: Micro-USB
- Operating System: TinkerOS is a Debian Linux derivative & Android 6.01
The board supports H.264 and H.265 playback support so a possibility for people looking at some sort of multimedia system, it can play HD video at 30 fps and can also support 24 bit audio.
Other nice features are that ASUS has colour coded the GPIO pins to help identify power rails and also general GPIO pins
The true success of this board will be the same as any new board that is released, what will the operating system support be like, what apps will be supported, how big will the community be with regards code examples and tutorials. Initially ASUS will have to develop a lot of this and hope that the maker community comes along picks up the board and it becomes popular.
Personally any board that comes out that adds competition for the Raspberry Pi in my book should be welcomed, I hope this is a success and ASUS continue to develop boards and perhaps even some other big motherboard manufacturers might as well.
Links
https://www.asus.com/Single-Board-Computer/Tinker-Board/