The ASUS Tinker Board is a

single-board computer A single-board computer (SBC) is a complete computer built on a single circuit board, with microprocessor(s), memory, input/output (I/O) and other features required of a functional computer. Single-board computers are commonly made as demonstrati ...

launched by ASUS in early 2017. Its physical size and

GPIO A general-purpose input/output (GPIO) is an uncommitted digital signal pin on an integrated circuit or electronic circuit (e.g. MCUs/ MPUs ) board which may be used as an input or output, or both, and is controllable by software. GPIOs have no ...

pinout are designed to be compatible with the second and third-generation

Raspberry Pi Raspberry Pi () is a series of small single-board computers (SBCs) developed in the United Kingdom by the Raspberry Pi Foundation in association with Broadcom. The Raspberry Pi project originally leaned towards the promotion of teaching basic ...

models. The first released board features

4K video 4K resolution refers to a horizontal display resolution of approximately 4,000 pixels. Digital television and digital cinematography commonly use several different 4K resolutions. In television and consumer media, 38402160 (4K UHD) is the dominan ...

, 2GB of onboard

RAM Ram, ram, or RAM may refer to: Animals * A male sheep * Ram cichlid, a freshwater tropical fish People * Ram (given name) * Ram (surname) * Ram (director) (Ramsubramaniam), an Indian Tamil film director * RAM (musician) (born 1974), Dutch * Ra ...

, gigabit

Ethernet Ethernet () is a family of wired computer networking technologies commonly used in local area networks (LAN), metropolitan area networks (MAN) and wide area networks (WAN). It was commercially introduced in 1980 and first standardized in 198 ...

and a

Rockchip RK3288 The Rockchip RK3288 is an ARM architecture System on Chip (SoC) from Rockchip. It is the first SoC, in August 2014, that uses the 32-bit ARM Cortex-A17 processor. It is a quad-core processor with a NEON coprocessor and hardware acceleration for vid ...

processor running at 1.8 GHz.

Specifications

History

ASUS's intent to release a single-board computer was leaked shortly after

CES 2017 CES (; formerly an initialism for Consumer Electronics Show) is an annual trade show organized by the Consumer Technology Association (CTA). Held in January at the Las Vegas Convention Center in Winchester, Nevada, United States, the event typi ...

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. ASUS originally planned for a late February 2017 release, but a UK vendor broke the embargo and began advertising and selling boards starting on 13 February 2017, before ASUS's marketing department was ready. ASUS subsequently pulled the release; the Amazon sales page was changed to show a 13 March 2017 release date, but was later removed entirely. However, , the Tinker Board again became available on Amazon. ASUS assured reviewer websites that the board is now in full production.

Benchmarks

In January 2017 tests showed the Tinker Board has roughly twice the processing power of the Raspberry Pi Model 3 when the Pi 3 runs in 32-bit mode. Because the Pi 3 has not released a 64-bit operating system yet, no comparisons are available against a Pi 3 running in 64-bit mode. In March 2017 benchmark testing found that while the WLAN performance is only around 30Mbit/s, the gigabit ethernet delivers a full 950Mbit/s throughput. RAM access tested using the ''mbw'' benchmark is 25% faster than the Pi 3. SD card (microSD) access is about twice as fast at 37MiB/s for buffered reads (compared to typically around 18MiB/s for the Pi 3) due to the Tinker Board's SDIO 3.0 interface, while cached reads can reach speeds up to 770MiB/s.

References

External links

ASUS Tinker board product page

Official support page for kernel and OS distribution download
{{Linux devices Asus products Single-board computers