Asus Tinker Board is designed to trump the Raspberry Pi 3

[HEXUS]

Its 1.8GHz Rockchip SoC is 'almost 2x faster', it has 2GB of RAM, plus H.264 4K decode.

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[chinf]

By now, the RPi is far more than just the bare board, it's an established system of supporting materials (development and education), community, market, third-party add-ons, etc. The raw Asus board certainly adds another option for hobbyists, but when comparing it with RPi it would be good to know more about things like compatibility, add-ons, community support and so on.

[AndyN33]

If the connections are the same and they can run the same OS, then hopefully the extras for the RPi will also work with this, giving people more choice.

[Irien]

The rockchip processor is usually far less "open" than other solutions (eg. Pi) so unless Asus are able to provide better documentation or developer resources, I very much doubt it'll be able to offer the level of flexibility that the Pi has done.

It'd be nice if I'm wrong, but Chinese SoC manufacturers are notorious for this, which is (in part) why the likes of BananaPi et al haven't exploded in the way the Raspberry has.

[bledd]

No H265? What were they thinking.

[imadaily]

If a board of those specs (fast processor, 2GB RAM and GbE) was released by the raspberry pi foundation I would have purchased at least one already. I know that ASUS can clearly make good products, however I just don't trust them be able to offer anyway near the level of support available from the RPF and pi community.

If you get stuck with anything on the raspberry pi, there is usually a guide on how to fix it and if not, the forums are pretty good at helping you sort out the problems. Of course, with the compute module 3 now having guaranteed availability until 2023 there will likely be support for rasbian running on the BCM2837 until at least then!

I'm just hoping that Raspberry Pi can make something very similar to this, though we're probably a few years off.

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

The Raspberry Pi is made in the UK,so you are also supporting a few local jobs too.

[sykobee]

The ecosystem matters more than a bit of performance.

That said the 2GB RAM and GigE make this reasonably attractive for those people like like using these for home server type uses.

OTOH, will there be a Raspberry Pi 4 this year?

[DanceswithUnix]

At 2GB you can run a Minecraft server off that, I suspect they are going to need a lot more than the 35 they said they have in stock.

Make that 34

[OilSheikh]

Does Asus not make enough money already ?

[aceuk]

OTOH, will there be a Raspberry Pi 4 this year?

I think it's unlikely based on the comments Eben Upton has made in various interviews. It sounds like the Raspberry Pi Foundation are waiting for certain components to come down in price in order to keep the Pi 4 at the same price point as the current model.

https://hardware.slashdot.org/story/16/09/29/0018255/the-slashdot-interview-with-raspberry-pi-founder-and-ceo-eben-upton

[DanceswithUnix]

I think it's unlikely based on the comments Eben Upton has made in various interviews. It sounds like the Raspberry Pi Foundation are waiting for certain components to come down in price in order to keep the Pi 4 at the same price point as the current model.

https://hardware.slashdot.org/story/...ceo-eben-upton

Which I really don't understand. They have made platforms that are cheaper and different with the zero and compute module. They use naming to remind us of the old BBC Micro, but they were really expensive machines back in the day.

Personally what I would really like to see from Asus is an mini ITX board which can take dimms (or SO DIMMS).

[3dcandy]

Which I really don't understand. They have made platforms that are cheaper and different with the zero and compute module. They use naming to remind us of the old BBC Micro, but they were really expensive machines back in the day.

Personally what I would really like to see from Asus is an mini ITX board which can take dimms (or SO DIMMS).

That would be a wholly different thing as the these cheaper SoC's don't support anything other than eMMC or similiar memory standards. You'd be at a totally different price point for starters

[DanceswithUnix]

That would be a wholly different thing as the these cheaper SoC's don't support anything other than eMMC or similiar memory standards. You'd be at a totally different price point for starters

True, and that isn't too disturbing which makes me wonder what itch I am wanting to scratch here.

For about £60 I can get an AM1 socket ITX board and a quad core APU to go on it which is more capable than anything I can currently get on one of these ARM boards. Slap some ram on it, add in a case and PSU. You need some storage, so either a bootable USB stick if you are going cheap or a £35 128GB SSD if you can manage it. Even the cheapest Linux server can easily end up around £150. That is beyond casual purchase for me.

Now with this board £55 gets me quite a lot of the way there. Using the A17 is unfortunate, the world these days is 64 bit and it just feels wrong to do any development or testing in a 32 bit environment. But if the USB and network performance is strong, it could still be useful. Wonder how well it will work with a USB to SATA bridge...

[3dcandy]

True, and that isn't too disturbing which makes me wonder what itch I am wanting to scratch here.

For about £60 I can get an AM1 socket ITX board and a quad core APU to go on it which is more capable than anything I can currently get on one of these ARM boards. Slap some ram on it, add in a case and PSU. You need some storage, so either a bootable USB stick if you are going cheap or a £35 128GB SSD if you can manage it. Even the cheapest Linux server can easily end up around £150. That is beyond casual purchase for me.

Now with this board £55 gets me quite a lot of the way there. Using the A17 is unfortunate, the world these days is 64 bit and it just feels wrong to do any development or testing in a 32 bit environment. But if the USB and network performance is strong, it could still be useful. Wonder how well it will work with a USB to SATA bridge...

That's exactly what I did

[Biscuit]

One of the downsides of the Pi IMO (unless this has changed) is that it can't run android. Now I know that there is a whole pile of cheap alternatives and devices that can, but a device with the pi's infrastructure that could also run android would be huge.

If Asus can utilise at least some of that add on market by sharing connector layouts AND they can get a nice android build that's compatible.... They could be onto an interesting product range.