ASUS Launches Raspberry Pi-Esque 'Tinker Board' with 4K Support | Hacker News Reader

ASUS Launches Raspberry Pi-Esque 'Tinker Board' with 4K Support

lifehacker.com.au

104 pointsrcarmo49 comments

Sweet! Another compelling option for sub-$100 SBCs. I've been keeping track of them in a Google Sheet at https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1TCugLk0GSukeWjhsLu73....

That is a phenomenal resource, thank you so much!

Great list - one you're missing is the $5 Pi Zero by the way.

Thanks! It's in there (row 21), but I got the price wrong.

Thanks for compiling it! You should add affiliate links on it. I was just trying to get to the product page so I ended up googling it instead, but if it was one click away... :)

Great idea! Thank you.

Nice list, but your missing the OrangePi Zero ($7 with WiFi, POE, Ethernet), NanoPi Neo & a bunch of other boards from Xunlong & FriendlyARM.

It'll always be missing a bunch. Feel free to add them as proposed edits!

Nice work! Have a look on udoo.org for more boards :-)

If you're willing to deal with being outside the range of officially supported boards (or strongly community supported), there seems to be an endless supply of options. Just for AllWinner-based devices, there's a long list at https://linux-sunxi.org/Category:Devices (which includes some from your list like BananaPi and OrangePi). Since many routers are around the sub-$100 mark, you can also check out any of the dd-wrt / openwrt / tomato / etc. devices too. And then you can also go out of scope even further and check out FPGA-based boards (such as http://store.gadgetfactory.net/papilio-pro-spartan-6-fpga-de..., or any of the many boards like it) or go up in price and get something like the NVIDIA Jetson.

(I'm not affiliated with any of those companies, I just tinker with some of their devices. There's just so many cool toys now; why couldn't they be around when I was a kid!)

I know there is a fine line between imitation, flattery, and blatant cloning, but I for one applaud that the board and port layout match those of the RasPi.

This means cases and HATs and certain other peripherials are interchangeable (at least) at a mechanical level, which is a very good thing, instead of promulgating another custom form factor.

It's great that vendors are standardizing on the layout. The same thing happened with the IBM PC/AT motherboard, and that spawned the entire PC clone industry:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AT_(form_factor)

Can someone explain what prevents a board like this from supporting USB3 (vs. the Odroid boards)?

I either want something much smaller and cheaper for IoT tinkering or something with USB3 and gigabit ethernet for NAS and high-bandwidth sensors (cameras and depth cameras). Does anyone know a board in the latter category?

Maybe this? http://up-shop.org/4-up-boards

>what prevents a board like this from supporting USB3

The choice of which CPU/SoC (system on chip) drives that. The Odroids that support USB3 have an Amlogic CPU that includes USB3. This board has a Rockchip RK3288 that does not support it.

The Odroid XU4 comes to mind.

There are also some boards, such as the Cubieboard2 and Cubietruck, that have on-board SATA III

It's probably a price point issue. The latest Odroids have Exynos SoCs with the latest feature set and a price to match. Anything lower market is not going to have the chip IP, internal data bus, and high-speed transceiver IP to support these interfaces because the markets the SoCs were originally aimed at (cellphones, set-top boxes, IoT junk) don't need them.

I know there's some controversy about the open-source-ness of the Raspberry Pi. Can anybody here guess from the specs whether this device will have similar issues?

99% of SoCs have those issues, so I would guess yes.

There isn't much controversy unless you follow stalmanisn (not that there is anything wrong with it).

The SoCs require some closed source blobs to work this is the case for just about any computing device out there.

The board designers are also somewhat limited in what they can release because they often are under an NDA again nothing wrong with that it's just how it is.

You can try and build everything from OS components but you'll fail or will end up with something which isn't very useable or useful.

I rather have good modern boards that are mostly open than a completely open clone of a 1982 era computer.

Thanks. Admittedly, I own four RPi's, and have not worried too much, but was just curious.

Stick with your Pi boards. Better experience all round.

Yeah, this is another waste of time.

I believe Rockchips have closed source drivers on their device tree, so forget ever running a truly open source distro or building your own. I'll gladly be corrected about that.

The Mali GPU drivers are closed source binary blobs, so you're forever stuck on the vendor's old kernel, or you can run a later kernel but never play games or watch video.

There's a reason the Raspberry Pi is still outselling all competitors with hardware half as powerful - it's open source and it works.

I think the minute it sells in the US I would order one, though I may have to wait if too many orders happen. If it stays at that under $80 range that is. I love the idea of having something the size of a RPi and being able to slap Linux on it and put services I can use in my LAN. Also of course the ability to be able to do much more with it. I wonder if there's a reason it hasn't hit the US yet.

Has this been officially launched? There is no word about it on the Asus USA website, I have searched other Asus global sites with no results either. I couldn't see the Asus logo on any of the pictures published on CDC.

Lifehacker and CDC are sufficiently reputable sources but isn't the above a bit strange?

I wonder if this board is cost-effective for non-gpu datascience, especially in terms of power consumption.

I have read a paper on several single-board computers, saying that they were almost there, despite being ARM processors.

mind linking the paper?

Can't find it. Here is something similar: https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/645a/a7fdcccb1eb2287b7094a2...

There are several actual papers on google scholar though.

You can get the Deep Belief stack running on a Pi GPU:

https://petewarden.com/2014/06/09/deep-learning-on-the-raspb...

Aside from that, I don't think the performance will be acceptable. I've been running Spark and Jupyter on a 20-core, 5 node cluster and it's acceptable, but only useful for debugging (because stuff happens slower).

You might want to look at the Pi compute boards they come with stronger cups and don't have any of the crap you don't need.

The problem with the compute boards is that they don't have anything you may need, like something to talk with each other.

If I wanted to build a cluster out of them, I'd probably have to break out the USB connections in some way, probably meaning a whole custom PCB or something... Given that there are more powerful Pi clones out there I don't get the appeal for this particular usecase.

I wonder if it has hardware HEVC decoding support?

It's based on Rockchip RK3288.[1] And according to wikipedia[2] RK3288 has "K H.264 and 10bits H.265 video decode, 1080P multi video decode"

[1] https://liliputing.com/2017/01/asus-tinker-board-raspberry-p... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rockchip_RK3288

Has only 2GB RAM. A version with 4GB for $20 more would perform better as a limited use desktop PC.

My Intel chromebook has only 2GB of RAM, and is good enough to develop on - YMMV.

I mean, PCs from thirty years ago (when RAM was measured in kilobytes) were good enough to develop on. Quad cores and gigabytes of RAM sure are nice to have, though.

Of course, for a barebones PC, you don't really need "Nice".

I heard a delightful retort recently to this kind of comment:

"And if my grandmother had wheels, she'd be a bicycle"

Who's to say that the architecture can support 4GB, or that adding the components in would only bump up the price by $20, or that ASUS wanted to make something different to the device they made but just didn't know how, or that the goal is to have a device targeted at the 'limited use desktop PC' market, or that users of a limited use desktop PC would find memory the biggest constraint on this device for their particular choice of OS ... and so on.

It's easy to identify ways that you could improve the specifications, and increase the cost, of pretty much any device. It's hubris to believe designers / vendors of hardware are ignorant of this.

It supports 4GB - https://www.amazon.com/Development-Rockchip-Cortex-A17-Proce... - and with modern browsers 4GB is required for comfortable use.

What about 3D acceleration; does it come with drivers which fully support OpenGL?

No definitive answer if the right drivers are bundled, but it's an rk3288, and this looks promising: http://freaktab.com/forum/tv-player-support/rk3288-devices/4...

You said the magic word: drivers. There are already plenty of boards with superior hardware to the Raspberry Pi. But one of the Pi's advantages is its driver support. That support in itself is a function of the enormous community that has sprouted up around it.

So thats what remains to be seen: are the drivers going to be written/debugged to make all of that hardware play nice with each other.

Agreed, a while ago I tried one of the Orange pi boards for a mere $10. While you get a lot of bang for the buck, the support community for alternative boards is tiny. I spent quite a bit of time working out the kinks to get to similar utility of a raspberry out of the box.

RK3288 comes with an ARM Mali-T760 MP4 GPU

This, and the Mali driver is closed source, so if it doesn't do what you want, you're screwed.

I use a rk3288 Chromebook with Crouton. While I couldn't get GPU accelerated X under that environment I did manage to run some OpenCL demos, which is significantly more than I was expecting.

I'm not sure why Chipsets list their capabilities as being GLes only when they seem far more capable than Full OpenGL cards from years past, I would have thought that part would be down to drivers more than anything. What could a i740 do that the Mali760 can't?

Nothing. It's just that OpenGL drivers are incredibly complex. That same hardware supports DirectX 11 on Windows...

Another example is Mesa, where chips like the Raspberry Pi's VC4 and Adreno support desktop OpenGL because Mesa already has much of the plumbing in place, whereas the proprietary drivers only implement ES.

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