There have been rumours of an Asus alternative to the Raspberry Pi being launched and now such a board is available to buy. Asus’ new Raspberry Pi rival also offers 4K video playback and 24-bit audio support in exchange for a £55 price tag.
Called the “Asus 90MB0QY1-M0EAY0 Tinker Board,” or the “Tinker Board” for short, the 8.5cm by 5.3cm computer features a quad-core Arm Cortex A17 CPU running at 1.8GHz, ARM Mali-T764 GPU, and 2GB of DDR3 memory. The most recent revision of the Raspberry Pi, the Raspberry Pi 3 Model B, sports a 64-bit Cortex A53 quad-core processor. The A17 in the Tinker Board only supports 32-bit instructions.
Discussing the reasoning behind the creation of the Tinker Board, Asus 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.” Asus believes the capabilities of the Tinker Board will make possible projects that were too much to ask of even for the newest Raspberry Pi revision.
The Tinker Board also comes with a Mali-T764 GPU inside, which is more powerful than the Broadcom VideoCore IV inside the Pi 3. There’s hardware support for H.265 4K decoding instead of just 1080p, and Asus claims it pulls in almost double the benchmark score in Geekbench, which should equate to better 3D performance. Other features include gigabit Ethernet, support for SDIO 3.0, and swappable antennas for the built-in 802.11 b/g/n Wi-Fi module.
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.
A large part of the appeal of the Raspberry Pi is its software support and community, which is expected to grow further following the release of the PIXEL Linux desktop for x86 PCs. Asus, on the other hand, will be starting its community from scratch. The Tinker Board is available to pre-order now, with shipping expected at the beginning of February 2017.
