Asus Takes on Raspberry Pi with 4K-capable Tinker Board

Previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13456357

The problem I have with these boards that pop up is that they get announced, they aren't quite compatible with the popular alternative (the Raspberry Pi), so you buy one and it ends up sitting in a shelf somewhere. I still remember the whole Intel Edison disaster.

These days, the primary decider of which board I'll use is how big the ecosystem is. The Raspberry Pi ecosystem (as well as the Arduino ecosystem) is huge, so that's definitely a big plus. Other alternatives, for example the ESP8266, that are compatible with the "big player" (in this case the Arduino), get this advantage for free.

There isn't a lack of RPi-like SBCs, so Asus needs to do serious amount of PR and have persistence for long-term presence to stand out.

Here is a random recent list of 90 different competitors: http://linuxgizmos.com/table-compares-90-hacker-friendly-sin...

What's the mainline kernel support situation for this SoC? If not mainline support, what's the kernel security update story?

Doesn't look like there's a real time clock and accompanying battery, like most other boards like this. I wonder why that's left out? It can't cost that much to add and seems pretty important.

This, minus HDMI, plus POE, and I'd be in swoon city.

I see online many negative comments about Rockchip, anyone have numbers or know how Rockchip would affect development, compared to a RPi?

Since I've moved to an all-Kodi household, this is definitely interesting to me.

So ARMv7-A is still, like, a thing?