ASUS Tinker Board

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Dirk Broer
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#1 ASUS Tinker Board

Post by Dirk Broer »

In the list of Raspberry Pi contenders there's a new kid on the block: ASUS, a well-known name in hardware land.

The sheer user base and abundance of hardware and software made for the Raspberry Pi keep even their CPU/SOC-wise older models (A, A+, B, B+ and Zero) in the running while the Raspi 2 and 3 were leaps forward enough to leave most of their competitors without market share.

Let's take the Hummingboard/Cubox. In theory much faster solutions, based upon single, dual or quad core ARM Cortex-A9 based SOCs and, in their original Hummingboard form, using the same dimensions as the Raspberry A and B. With the advent of the B+ those dimensions meant zilch and with the advent of the Quad-core Pi 2 (for a mere quarter of the price of a quad core Hummingboard) SolidRun appeared to have made a solid mistake with their pricing model. The Dutch importer even didn't want me to sell a quad-core Hummingboard. Now that's marketing, playing too hard to get.

Only the Korean Odroids seem to be able to make a slight dent into the Raspberry market share. Their Odroid C1 (and later C1+ model) is based upon a ARM Cortex-A5 quad core that is clocked significantly higher than boards of competitors and both software- and hardware-wise the support is reliable, a point that sets them apart from most other fruity pi's (Orange Pi, Banana Pi, etc). Their new Odroid C2 is based upon a Cortex-A53, as is the Pi 3, but with double the memory and ready for 64-bit OS-es, of which one has surfaced so far (Suse Linux/ARM).

Where does ASUS fits in in all this? The Tinker Board uses a quad-core Cortex-A17, which is 32-bit but which is a better CPU than the Cortex-A7 of the Pi 2. In fact it is a well-known SOC around this forum, as it is a Rockchip RK3288 SoC clocked at 1.2GHz (I even saw 1.8GHz), which according to the company's own GeekBench run, is around twice as fast as the BCM2837 chip found on the Raspberry Pi 3 running at the same clock speed with all four cores running. Aside from the stronger processing power, the Asus Tinker Board also features a 1Gbps Ethernet port and the ability to decode 4K H.264 video content. It also has 2 GB of RAM, like the Odroid C2 and costs around £55.
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#2 Re: ASUS Tinker Board

Post by Silver »

Thanks Dirk, great info.
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#3 Re: ASUS Tinker Board

Post by Dirk Broer »

A not-so-enthusiastic review of the Tinker Board, which seems to have been pulled from the market since.
Explaining Computers.com takes on the Tinker Board
Tinker board made it to Wikipedia
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#4 Re: ASUS Tinker Board

Post by Dirk Broer »

There's a new and improved ASUS Tinker Board, the ASUS Tinker Board S:
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The main difference being the standard onboard 16GB eMMC. Looks like you'll get a free heat sink too!
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#5 Re: ASUS Tinker Board

Post by Dirk Broer »

After the initial tests: Forget that ASUS-supplied heatsink! It's a mere 2cm x 2cm x 1cm (high), and you can burn your finger when trying exactly how hot it runs.
I found a 4cm x 4cm x 1.5cm chipset heatsink on an old mobo that fits too, and placed a Noctua NF-A4x20 on it.
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#6 Close, but no cigar

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asus-tinkerboard
  1. Starting BOINC client version 7.14.2 for arm-unknown-linux-gnueabihf
  2. log flags: file_xfer, sched_ops, task
  3. Libraries: libcurl/7.64.0 OpenSSL/1.1.1d zlib/1.2.11 libidn2/2.0.5 libpsl/0.20.2 (+libidn2/2.0.5) libssh2/1.8.0 nghttp2/1.36.0 librtmp/2.3
  4. Data directory: /var/lib/boinc-client
  5. OpenCL: Mali-T760 0: Mali-T760 (driver version 1.2, device version OpenCL 1.2 v1.r18p0-01rel0.6425238dc4504912643d599da5dc3b58, 1991MB, 1991MB available, 0 GFLOPS peak) :mumum:
  6. [libc detection] gathered: 2.28, Debian GLIBC 2.28-10
  7. Host name: linaro-alip
  8. Processor: 4 ARM ARMv7 Processor rev 1 (v7l) [Impl 0x41 Arch 7 Variant 0x0 Part 0xc0d Rev 1]
  9. Processor features: half thumb fastmult vfp edsp thumbee neon vfpv3 tls vfpv4 idiva idivt vfpd32 lpae evtstrm
  10. OS: Linux Debian: Debian GNU/Linux 10 (buster) [4.4.194|libc 2.28 (Debian GLIBC 2.28-10)]
  11. Memory: 1.95 GB physical, 163.99 MB virtual
  12. Disk: 14.22 GB total, 10.55 GB free
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#7 Re: ASUS Tinker Board

Post by Dirk Broer »

ASUS Tinker boards
NameSOCArchitectureSpeedGPUeMMCNPU/TPU
Tinker BoardRockchip RK328832-bit quad-core Cortex A-174x 1800 MHzMali-T760--
Tinker Board SRockchip RK328832-bit quad-core Cortex A-174x 1800 MHzMali-T76016 GB-
Tinker Board 2Rockchip RK339964-bit hexa-core Cortex-A72 (2) / Cortex-A53 (4)2x 2016 MHz, 4x 1512 MHzMali-T860--
Tinker Board 2SRockchip RK339964-bit hexa-core Cortex-A72 (2) / Cortex-A53 (4)2x 2016 MHz, 4x 1512 MHzMali-T86016 GB-
Tinker Edge TNXP i.MX 8M64-bit Quad-core ARM Cortex-A534x 1500 MHzVivante GC7000 Lite8 GBGoogle Edge TPU
Tinker Edge RRockchip RK3399 Pro64-bit hexa-core Cortex-A72 (2) / Cortex-A53 (4)2x 1800 MHz, 4x 1400 MHzMali-T86016 GBRockchip NPU
The TPU and NPU don't come for free, both money- and power-wise. The Tinker Edge T (just like the Tinker Board 2) wants 45 Watt via 12-19V, so ideally a 15V/3A PSU, the Tinker Edge R wants 65 Watt via 12-19V, so ideally a 16V/4A PSU.
The local hardware store already think I'm nuts when asking for 5V/4A (Odroid-XU4, Jetson Nano, CubieBoard 4).....

BTW: The Tinker Board 2 gets slashed at the normally totally uncritical Toms Hardware: "OUR VERDICT: For $129 the Asus Tinker Board 2S is too expensive for what is really just a Raspberry Pi alternative. Buy a Raspberry Pi 4 instead."
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The verdict. Nice heatsink though.
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