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According to Farnell, which is stocking it, it has a Quad core 1.8GHz ARM Cortex-A17 CPU from Rockchip – faster than Raspberry Pi 3, but 32bit compared to Raspberry Pi’s 64bit. Tinker Board also has more memory – 2GB dual channel LPDDR3.
Tinker Board is more expensive, at £55.
Its Rockchip RK3288 has a ARM Mali-T764 GPU with support for OpenGL ES1.1/2.0/3.0, Open VG1.1, OpenCL and DirectX11, plus a 4Kx2K H.264/H.265(10bit) video decoder.
At chip level 3,840 x 2,160 display is possible, and 4Kx2K at 60frame/s over HDMI 2.0
4K resolution is one-up on Raspberry Pi’s otherwise excellent 1080p output – the video system on Raspberry Pi was a stand-out feature from the start.
However, having 4K suits Tinker Board to media centre applications on high-resolution large screens – and it looks like this is an application on Asus’ radar because the board is said to support Supports Debian Linux with Kodi – Kodi is media centre software.
Tinker Board looks even more Raspberry Pi-like when you take other interfaces into account. These are, according to Farnell: 4x USB 2.0 ports, 40pin IO header, 3.5mm audio jack, CSI for camera, DSI port supporting HD resolution and Micro SD slot.
Ethernet is Gigabit and it has both Bluetooth and Wi-Fi.
As with all Raspberry Pi clones, it is not necessarily the on-board hardware that will make them successful, but the amount and quality of software and software support.
