Asus Tinker Board is a Much More Powerful Alternative to the Raspberry Pi 3.

cageymaru

cageymaru

Fully [H]
Joined
Apr 10, 2003
Messages
22,087
The Asus Tinker Board is Asus's answer to the Raspberry Pi 3. In typical Asus fashion, the CPU benchmarks twice as fast as the Raspberry Pi 3, and even boasts of support for HDMI H.264 / 4K video decode while the Raspberry Pi is relegated to standard HDMI 1080p High Resolution. Having all these extra features requires 25% more power draw and drives the cost to $57; nearly double the amount of a Raspberry Pi. The first thing that popped into my head was does it support the latest emulation like RetroPie, and is there a version being worked on for it. The short term answer to that is "No", and "No" according to RetroPie, but this may change in the future.

Discussing the reasoning behind the creation of the 'Asus Pi', the Taiwanese computer firm said "Raspberry Pi has been in the market for so long, we're here to expand users' choices with more options. And this board has 4K support, higher SoC performance, faster Ethernet transmission, and flexibility for the memory size." For software Asus says that it has released its own OS for the Tinker Board, based upon Debian like the Raspberry Pi OS. It also claims to be working on wider OS support, considering the likes of ubuntu and OpenSUSE, as well as Kodi support.
 
Last edited:
One of the reasons the video engine on the Raspberry Pi is knee-capped at 1080 is because it's video hardware is open source. Asus can't guarantee that which means you are tied to proprietary driver updates. (They want to keep their secret sauce of how their video engines work..well secret) These standards were left open for a reason: So people can tinker with and understand how these things work. That's the entire purpose of the Raspberry Pi.
 
DigitalGriffin said:
One of the reasons the video engine on the Raspberry Pi is knee-capped at 1080 is because it's video hardware is open source. Asus can't guarantee that which means you are tied to proprietary driver updates. (They want to keep their secret sauce of how their video engines work..well secret) These standards were left open for a reason: So people can tinker with and understand how these things work. That's the entire purpose of the Raspberry Pi.
Click to expand...

It is a mix of price and performance evolving into a bare pcb with certain limited connections offered which makes it cheap and the software support as you stated is something everyone can contribute to.
If you take any of these ingredients out of the mix it is likely to not find any traction in the real world.
 
Unless Asus plans on doing any kernel development, chances are this is another dead end product. Much like Odriod and OrangePi are. While there are a few dedicated contributors for those platforms, the mainstream flows with rPi. I would love to see a more powerful rPi in the same form-factor but it does what it does okay enough. I don't see much of a market for this as most people buying a rPi won't see the value of paying double the price even if performance is doubled if there just isn't any OS support.
 
It runs Kodi, so if it plays 4k as advertised, then it'd be great for people who just want a small media center-type PC.

Not nearly as good as a standard RPi for all the other things people buy an RPi for though, for all the open-source reasons people already stated.
 
Yeah, I'm not sure it's what I'm looking for either. Honestly I want the most powerful little pc I can get with sata storage for NAS type operations and logging. I've tried the RPI 2/3 and tried the western digital mybooklive (can get root access), tried the wrt 54g back in the day and an asus storage router and various other things. But I always end up with a cheap pc running linux. Tried the kangaroo pc (little atom based windows pc) as well. Know some people who tried the compute sticks as well. Just seems like they aren't stable enough. If I could feel confident that I could leave any of these cheap devices running for 6 months or a year without it hard locking eventually I'd be happy but none of them seem to be able to do that for me.
 
RPI is mainstream, it has the community support. So unless this thing is pretty much an RPI with faster hardware, it's going to suffer.

Look at the Arduino and the LaunchPad 430 by TI. The latter wanted to steal the Arduino's thunder by being a super cheap alternative, and it was at $5 (back when Arduino's were regularly $25+). Yet they didn't get the software support to where it was stupid simple and people didn't use it.

Also, disappointed they didn't include an ADC on this new board. That's the one thing lacking on the Pi. You can add an MCP3008 (or another ADC) yourself, but it kinda sucks having to do so.
 
stormy1 said:
another dead end.
they aren't competitors until they actually get what makes the rpi good.
Click to expand...
Someday, though, somebody is going to fix what makes the RPi awful...the shared USB-based interface to the NIC and the aweful performance for disk access when you attach a "real" disk (i.e., the current USB interface is SOOOOO BADDDD that even connecting a cheap SSD via an SSD-SATA cable won't perform).

The RPi has plenty of processing power and even memory for some really cool apps - you just can't get data on/off it fast enough to actually use.

BTW, it doesn't look like ASUS fixed any of this - so they've got more CPU and its still hamstrung by its IO. Other competitors haven't addressed this either - for example, Odroid got almost all the rest right and left USB alone - so their "GigE NIC" is actually useless because its still shared IO on the already poorly designed USB interface.
 
What I still miss is proper thin LCDs, I don't even care about touchscreen. Either there aren't any proper RGB 30 fps thin LCDs, or I just don't know where to look.
 
DigitalGriffin said:
One of the reasons the video engine on the Raspberry Pi is knee-capped at 1080 is because it's video hardware is open source. Asus can't guarantee that which means you are tied to proprietary driver updates. (They want to keep their secret sauce of how their video engines work..well secret) These standards were left open for a reason: So people can tinker with and understand how these things work. That's the entire purpose of the Raspberry Pi.
Click to expand...
There was a thread this last week where an Asus AMD card was having problems.
Asus refused to support anything but the driver on the CD.
So yep.
 
I like how they added a gigabit ethernet port, more ram, and faster cpu. I was disappointed to not see usb 3 support though.
Hopefully rPi takes that into consideration when they release the rPi 3b.
I built my rPi2b as a tor router and was disappointed to be bottlenecked by 100Mbps.
 
OmenemO said:
So does an Odroid C2, and that has better support by the looks of things.
Click to expand...

Well, the support is really the key IF you're a tinkerer or developer.

If you're just a person looking to run Openelec/Kodi at 4k, then it's really down to cost I think. As long as Kodi runs without issues, then I personally wouldn't care about developer support.
 
PigLover said:
Someday, though, somebody is going to fix what makes the RPi awful...the shared USB-based interface to the NIC and the aweful performance for disk access when you attach a "real" disk (i.e., the current USB interface is SOOOOO BADDDD that even connecting a cheap SSD via an SSD-SATA cable won't perform).

The RPi has plenty of processing power and even memory for some really cool apps - you just can't get data on/off it fast enough to actually use.

BTW, it doesn't look like ASUS fixed any of this - so they've got more CPU and its still hamstrung by its IO. Other competitors haven't addressed this either - for example, Odroid got almost all the rest right and left USB alone - so their "GigE NIC" is actually useless because its still shared IO on the already poorly designed USB interface.
Click to expand...


There is another board that is coming out that bridges that gap, I can't remember the exact name. But I think it costs $99 and has proper SATA / USB3 support. That has always been a complaint of mine for the Rpi.
 
Bandalo said:
Well, the support is really the key IF you're a tinkerer or developer.

If you're just a person looking to run Openelec/Kodi at 4k, then it's really down to cost I think. As long as Kodi runs without issues, then I personally wouldn't care about developer support.
Click to expand...

I should've been more clear. The Asus board is a Rockchip soc, it will not run kodi or LibreElec without issues.
 
virtualheretic said:
I like how they added a gigabit ethernet port, more ram, and faster cpu. I was disappointed to not see usb 3 support though.
Hopefully rPi takes that into consideration when they release the rPi 3b.
I built my rPi2b as a tor router and was disappointed to be bottlenecked by 100Mbps.
Click to expand...

usb 3 support would include high power mode which is outside of design targets of being a low powered device. Gigabit networking has more processing then it's capable of.
 
The board calls it as 55 pounds. The comparison is more like $70 vs. $40.
 
I think an odroid c2 would be a better choice at the rpi3 price point, the odroid xu4 a superior choice at the same price (usb3, etc).

The problem with all of these boards is the support, especially on the software side.
ARM doesn't do jack crap with helping anyone provide MALI gpu drivers. No one does really.
The rpi series does have some serious issues with IO throughput, which makes them okay for electronics projects but not so great for a replacement computer.
 
OmenemO said:
I should've been more clear. The Asus board is a Rockchip soc, it will not run kodi or LibreElec without issues.
Click to expand...

The original article claims they have "Kodi support". I'd imagine, given it's popularity, that making sure Kodi runs smoothly would be a priority for Asus.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top