Asus Release Raspberry Pi Competitor Tinkerboard 2 and 2S | Hacker News Reader

Asus Release Raspberry Pi Competitor Tinkerboard 2 and 2S

tomshardware.com

118 pointsrbanffy115 comments

My issue with SBC is they often under deliver in expectations much less exceed. Most of that has to do with arm/half baked encoders and software compatibility especially long-term.

This makes me question what ARM will look like in the traditional compute environment such as desktop/laptops. With the exception of Apple because of their complete vertical integration how will platforms handle and developers changing ARM architectures?

Please correct me if I'm wrong but it means if you purchased software that works with one architecture it'll have to be updated/compiled. From the end user perspective repurchased...

Coming from a Windows background we will no longer enjoy the backwards compatibility like we have with x86 if ARM becomes more mainstream. Just look at the horrible fragmentation of Android as a precursor and a glimpse at what development could look like which is through an app store.

ARM has some backwards compatibility if you choose to implement it. E.g. Windows natively supports ARM32 and ARM64 in Windows 10. Apple chooses to only support ARM64 for simplicity.

In either case any future change in the ARM architecture couldn't be worse than how each platform handles running x86 apps on ARM and currently the Apple M1 does that better than the previous Intel chips they were using.

Performance and stability of the SDcards in PIs my issue with them. I'd much rather have one of the boards with say a couple of GB built in storage, or an m2 connector.

You really can't use them in production like this

I believe the Pi’s have had USB boot for a while

But that's still not very cool, as the USB is externally accessible. + it will take away some bandwidth

What OS is it compatible with?

I learned from version 1 that even though the specs may beat a rasperry the software eco system is worth a lot too

Looks like it supports a few (https://tinkerboarding.co.uk/wiki/index.php/Software#Operati...) e.g. TinkerOS (a Debian Linux derivative), Armbian (Debian or Ubuntu derivative), and Android. I didn't find anything on whether that's changed for the 2 and 2S.

Yeah I tried TinkerOS and Android on my v1. Was not a pleasant experience.

Trying to get vid acceleration running involved an endless rabbithole of sketchy binary blobs posted in random forums. Not what I had in mind when I thought "tinker"

Based on my tinkerboard s it does not really matter. Their software support is just plain bad, even in 3rd party distros.

It will probably eventually be pretty good or at least the CPU parts should be well supported since this is the same part that's used in the Pinebook Pro & RockPro64 and there's a lot of work going on to get support fully mainlined.

I've recently bought the Helios64 (https://wiki.kobol.io/helios64/hardware/) and it looks pretty similar and is well supported by Armbian.

I bought the first version.

It supports a special version of debian and android. There are third party OSs too, but they don’t have good driver support.

The biggest issue is that tinkerboard uses Malİ GPU and its driver is propriatery.

I bought the tinkerboard as a media device hyped up about x265 capabilities and 192khz/24 bit audio. The x265 playback only worked with the bundled media player, which was buggy.

Software-wise I haven’t been happy, hardware-wise it was better than a raspberry pi.

I wiped my screen twice trying to remove the speck from about the letter I.

Glad I'm not the only one who thought his screen was dirty because of that.

It's a dotted capital letter I ("eye"), which is a dead giveaway for Turkish.

Yeah, I typed the answer on mobile. It’s a typo :).

Are there any ARM boards with software support on par with the Raspberry Pi?

This complaint seems to come up every time a non-Pi SBC is discussed

Many boards have working distros, lots of software already ported and dedicated people in forums willing to help newbies; the problem lies in that "on par". The Raspberry Pi foundation can put some good money where other boards would rely mostly on enthusiasts. That's the point: with the Raspberries you get their Raspbian/RPiOS, while other boards manufacturers usually don't offer comparable quality distros, therefore it is often much better to use a 3rd party community produced distros. So, on par? No. Good enough? Yes, definitely.

Take a look at the number of boards supported by Armbian and DietPi for example.

https://www.armbian.com/download/

https://dietpi.com/#download

> even though the specs may beat a rasperry the software eco system is worth a lot too

Yes. In Fred Brooks Mythical Man-Month terms, the RPi is a software system product (with awful hardware), whereas OEM would-be competitors like this are just software (i.e. hobby projects). They might work for the authors most of the time, but they probably won't work for your use case without a large investment of time. Not even if you work in the same company.

Partial exception made for Armbian supported boards here. They are getting part of the way to RPi in terms of system quality on much more limited resources. (Of course both RPi and Armbian depend on the huge amount of work embodied in Debian.)

The software and documentation ecosystem is more important than the hardware, in the end.

We had a SBC embedded in a product, so I tested exhaustively pretty much every one on the market, then used two of them in the real world for the last few years.

Tinkerboard was the most solid and performant across all different areas, with no gotchas like most of the other boards ended up having.

In the SBC world they all look the same, but live with them for a while and the added experience of Asus really makes a difference.

What did you learn about the differences between the Tinkerboards and rPi's? I've got snags I've run into with pi's in casual use, but I suspect they'll be different to what you've found just because you've had the chance to put both through a proper wringer.

the rPis of the era didn't have true gigabit ethernet, which I was using to drive cameras which saturated the link. The ethernet was via the USB 2 bus on them, so limited to 480mbps in theory, but much less in practice. So the rPis didn't get any testing as they failed on paper before even getting there.

Ah, ok. Yes, that does make sense. If you really need the IO bandwidth they were... less good.

I decommissioned my raspberries/odroids today in about of an old HP prodesk G3 400 SFF I bough for 50 bucks from a company that got new computers. I switched the fans to some old 90mm noctuas I had laying around and now it is actually more silent than my SBCs for which I had made very ghetto NAS solution.

The i5-6500 runs laps around these boards anyway. And I could sell my SBCs for a lot more than what the prodesk cost me (one pi4 with a PoE hat, one odroid xu4 in a cloudshell and a rock pi 4 with the big heatsink).

Unless you actually need the GPIO there is no need to go SBC.

> Unless you actually need the GPIO there is no need to go

> SBC.

Or form factor, or weight, or power consumption, or cooling - or a multitude of other reasons.

I do agree though that an old desktop PC can be miles better in terms of performance per dollar, but you'll probably pay for it in electricity bills in the long run.

Most laptops released in the past decade will at least match the rpi4's performance, with better GPU drivers to boot. And they can come close to the power consumption of a pi, especially the somewhat newer ones.

A quick google shows reports of those HP SFF systems idling at between 3-10 watts, depending on how old they are. The Pi4 uses about 3 watts at idle. This matches my experience with that vintage of CPU.

They will use more power when active, but with better performance per watt, optimistically using less power for a give unit of work.

Older laptops idle at about 12-17 watts according to powertop (so not including losses in the warm to touch power brick), would be surprising if sff from same era were much more efficient.

edit: searching around, people are reporting 10 ish watts on x220 era thinkpads. But still 3-5 watts sounds low for a desktop.

Also, Pi 4 idle power consumption at launch was significantly higher than with current firmware, those early Pi 4 figures were the only ones nearing 3 watts I think. And of course the less beefy Pi Zeros are sub 1W.

This absolutely. Whenever someone brings up using an SBC as some kind of cheap, low-end computer that will get stuffed behind a screen and keyboard/mouse combo and nothing else, I always bring up how even a 10 year old laptop could probably outperform even a rpi4.

Always get called a stick in the mud, too. Maybe I am. But seriously, if you just want a cheap linux desktop, grab any laptop from ebay from the past decade. If you want, strip all the casing and peripherals off -- the mainboards are pretty small.

Heck, you can repurpose the i2c bus on the video outputs for whatever you want. Could even use a breakout board and drive a microcontroller, get additional GPIO pins[0].

Probably other nifty hacks out there. The last gen "ExpressCard" expansion slots are basically external PCIe busses, you can great those out and add PCIe cards to a laptop board.

[0] https://hackaday.com/2014/06/18/i2c-from-your-vga-port/

Edit: To be clear, I'm not pushing back on the idea of the raspberry pi. There are a ton of valid uses for them. I'm specifically pushing back against the idea that they're cheap, power efficient general purpose linux machines.

They are definitely low power, but not necessarily power efficient. And I think re-purposing the mountain of e-waste instead of buying a bunch more new SBCs may be better ecologically, but all the power to those who want to have fun with a cool little ARM board. No sarcasm.

I see your point. The problem with old laptops is that they can have quirky or unsupported hardware or unstable power saving firmware. This can be like playing russian roulette.

The RPI on the other hand has some software that mostly just works.

I'm personally not a huge fan of the device, as the sd-cards always dies on me. But as a quick prototyping board they are great.

In case its not clear, this is the killer app for Raspberry Pi:

https://www.acmesystems.it/CM3-HOME

And this:

https://revolution.kunbus.com/

Please note, this puts open source home automation in the forefront of this rapidly expanding market.

RevPis are literally using CM3+ from raspberry, so I don't really see the point you're trying to make there? They're also far more expensive than regular RPis. (I use RevPis profesionally with Balena for fleet management.)

Edit: Are you arguing in favour of RPi(-like) devices by saying they can be very useful in applications where an old laptop/computer you have lying around wouldn't be?

Yeah, the use-case for rPi's is not just to 'function as a hackers toy', but also serve as the basis - a platform - for a great deal many other industry standard applications.

The Compute Module is rapidly becoming an embedded commodity - a SOM that is easy to source, has decent tooling, and for which there is an expanding source of developers...

Sure, there are other SOM/SOC vendors out there - but few have as resilient a distribution as the raspberryPi foundation.

But it turns out, its a pretty decent little computer for a lot of things: Just make your own breakout box.

I recently went down a similar route - I needed a HTPC to connect to my TV and instead of a Pi I used an old Intel Celeron NUC I had laying around - unfortunately I found out that the old Celeron[1] wasn’t really able to do 1080p video streaming fluidly (I tested from a variety of streaming websites).

As far as I can remember [2], even my old Pi 2 was able to stream 1080p no problem.

On the other hand, the NUC can boot from a SATA SSD, it can have plenty of RAM installed etc.

So, regarding the question if it’s better to use an old PC or a Pi: I guess it depends on what you’re trying to achieve.

[1] sorry I’m not home at the moment so I don’t have the model number, all I remember is that it was from the last generation of NUCs that still accepted DDR3 sticks, and that it’s got a Celeron processor. I set it up with Lubuntu and the streaming was done using default Firefox.

[2] it was long ago so I don’t remember the details but I am pretty sure that on my first Pi, which must have been a Pi 2, I was able to watch YouTube no problem. I also remember reading articles at the time where people were raving about how good video playback was for such an affordable device.

Older hardware does not support hardware decoding at higher resolutions for many formats so that takes out 1 of the major uses of old hardware as internet browsing device.

> But seriously, if you just want a cheap linux desktop, grab any laptop from ebay from the past decade. If you want, strip all the casing and peripherals off -- the mainboards are pretty small.

I totally believe that this would outperform the RPi4. But I don't always need much performance, and it seems like more work and/or uncertainty to me:

* Batteries. People say that if you don't cycle them occasionally they can swell and be a fire hazard. I'd rather not deal with that. Will "any laptop from ebay from the past decade" run without batteries in it?

* Running closed. I've also heard that laptops are designed to be used open for heat reasons. Will running it closed cause problems?

* Stripping casing and peripherals off. I want it in some case, ideally as compact as the Pi4. Can I find a good case for it and mount it successfully? I'm not much of a hardware DIYer—basically the closest I get is assembling a standard ATX desktop. And will it run headless? If the BIOS gets reset or something, do I need to reattach the stuff to get into the BIOS and allow it to boot without video / keyboard?

* Reproducibility. Let's say I'm using it to run a particular open source project (my NVR project, HomeAssistant, etc). From the perspective of either someone telling others how to set it up or the perspective of someone trying to follow those instructions, it's better if I have exactly the same thing, so there aren't so many variations and problems with the physical questions (see above), drivers, etc. The Pi4's availability and price are known quantities world-wide and for a long time. Whatever model I happened to find cheap probably isn't like that.

I've had success with a middle ground: buy an used NUC from eBay. Maybe it's hard to find the exact same model, but it's always the same form factor that doesn't need to be modded in a novel way, will always run a stock Linux distribution without problems, etc.

>* Batteries. People say that if you don't cycle them occasionally they can swell and be a fire hazard. I'd rather not deal with that. Will "any laptop from ebay from the past decade" run without batteries in it?

Yes, at least the ones with removable batteries that I've seen.

>* Running closed. I've also heard that laptops are designed to be used open for heat reasons. Will running it closed cause problems?

What use case would cause significant heat generation? Worst case you can get a $15 laptop stand with fans.

> What use case would cause significant heat generation? Worst case you can get a $15 laptop stand with fans.

I dunno; it's just something I've heard. [1] I suppose probably not in any scenario I'd consider an RPi4.

[1] Searched for this and found eg https://superuser.com/a/1536145

Also:

- compact form factor, cases etc.

- teaching esp kids (standardization)

- pre-built libraries and software compatibility (easier)

Example: I used an rpi4 and old LED TV to drive a digital wall art piece. SBC fit the space and pre-built software cut hours: I coded it up in HTML/JS and headless chrome.

>pre-built libraries and software compatibility

Surely this is the main con of ARM devices?

If you're running one of the recent Debian-based distros for these boards software compatibility isn't a big issue. Each SoC has its own funky firmware + GPU blobs needed for bootstrapping, they almost all use the same ARM64 ABI and can run a huge number of OSS binary and source packages.

I think it’s also worth noting that 50USD is a fantastic price for what you got -I can’t see anything even close to that good of a deal locally or on eBay, whereas I can buy a Pi with minimal effort right now.

I know. Most online deals are at least twice that. That would, however, still be cheaper than my rock pi 4 with accessories. I think I spent at least 70 bucks on my raspberry pi 4 with accessories.

Why are these devices limited to ram that's soldiered directly on the board instead of sdimm? type interface that can take any supported ram and would work (I assume) with some timing info provided to the bootloader?

There might be other reasons, but connectors are expensive and take a lot of space. It would also prevent them from differentiating the price.

Most people who I know work with tech and can afford expensive hardware if it makes sense. I would love to be able to use 2x64 GiB RAM with a SBC and would pay for this.

How would you power and cool such a beast? What kind of workloads would benefit from that much RAM while running happily on a CPU that fits on a typical SBC layout?

If you want a tiny workstation-class system, there are entirely decent mini ITX board you can stuff a recent AMD or Intel chip and tons of RAM into. You'll need a desktop-class cooling system and power supply, though, and it'll still have the footprint of 6-8 of these board, and probably about 15x the total volume and power consumption.

And, if you really want an ARM to play with, you can pick an Ampere eMag workstation.

the H2s in my prior comment are fanless and run off 14V to 20V(?) DC - I bought a 400W power supply from mouser(?) and figure that should power more machines then I'll ever need. (Power supply is way overkill, not sure why I got one so big :-P )

Sounds like you'd want something more like this[1].

[1]: http://www.biostar-usa.com/app/en-us/mb/introduction.php?S_I...

These(1) look interesting too, but they always seem to be out of stock. They were available in the $150 to $175 range for a while, but its dried up. With 2 NVME and 2 SSD, it might make for a nice lil home file server.

1: http://www.asrock.com/nettop/AMD/DeskMini%20A300%20Series/

A300 is very popular as a mini home server. Only catch is (AFAIU, have not tried yet) it wants a GPU to boot at all, so you’ll either have to put in an APU (eg 3200G/3400G) or a discrete GPU.

X300 is the successor BTW.

>it wants a GPU to boot at all

Oh? I hadn't heard that. Though to be honest, its a bit 'big' for my needs so I haven't looked too hard. Oddly enough - Noise is becoming my primary driver, not cpu or ram. So fanless designs really appeal

I say this everytime SBC's come up: ODroid H2's (1) They're not cheap - about $250 kitted out with 16G RAM and a cheap 250G SSD/M2. But you get full 64 bit linux/windows, dual ethernet, a nice selection of IO ports. And all the low power/small form factor goodness. Bonus - fanless and totally silent when used with SSD.

1: https://ameridroid.com/products/odroid-h2

I imagine the primary constraints are the small form factor and the cost. Memory training and calibration required to support different DIMM modules is probably prohibitive.

The ARM SoC (system on chip) CPUs these boards use often cap out at supporting 4GB of RAM. It's also much more expensive and power hungry to stuff a bunch more DDR4 onto a tiny board, and often messes with the layout (i.e., of you need two RAM chips instead of one).

The rk3399 CPU on this board also dates from 2016[^1] so adjust your expectations accordingly. :)

[^1] It's also a well-documented chip that's cheap, provides a nice performance bump over an RPi, and requires fewer proprietary blobs.

> The rk3399 CPU on this board also dates from 2016[^1] so adjust your expectations accordingly. :)

Speaking of which, I keep hoping to see SBCs based on the (delayed) rk3588. [1] "4x Cortex-A76 and 4x Cortex-A55 cores" (should be much faster than the RPi4), some kind of NPU (don't know the specs). Not sure about I/O, but I'd guess it'd be at least as good as the rk3399 is.

[1] https://www.cnx-software.com/2020/02/01/rockchip-rk3566-rk35...

Pine64 announced recently it will be their base SoC for new products, with the first one being an SBC.

Thanks for the pointer. Just looked. This announcement [1] says the rk3566a, which isn't quite as fancy. Still looks like a nice board. People on the message boards back in March [2] were guessing there won't be an rk3399-based Pine64 until early 2022. :-(

[1] https://www.pine64.org/2020/11/15/november-update-kde-pineph...

[2] https://forum.pine64.org/showthread.php?tid=9382&pid=61929#p...

The original Tinkerboard came out with much fanfare, then landed with a thud as it became apparent it was more of a "throw it at a wall and see if it sticks" SBC product.

I'll wait and see if this is any different.

Wonder why they went with the barrel jack for power over USB, as the latter seems more prevalent...?

I'm guessing to side-step the issues the raspberries are having. USB-C can carry enough juice but there are just so many crap cables out there & then the device gets blamed by the user because it's such a subtle failure mode

I'd second this. I tried yesterday using the brand new cable supplied with my Google Stadia Controller to use to connect my Phone to my car. It worked! Android Auto showed up - only to fail after 20 seconds. No turning around and reseating helped although the connection was physically better than the cable I was trying to replace.

USB-C cables are just a mess.

Keeping a cheap BOM, I'd bet. No licensing fees, conformance tests, etc.

Micro usb would have trouble delivering enough power because of its limitation to 5 volts. USB type-c could do higher voltage, but it requires power delivery circuitry which adds to the cost and complexity.

Well I still prefer USBC, I can understand the choice of a barrel jack here: it's simple, reliable, and less expensive.

I agree with the issue, but I'm sad since there isn't a "standard" size, so I'm back to collecting wall warts to power things again.

You're not supposed to use a random USB charger with SBCs. Always use the manufacturer provided PSU even if it is just a USB PSU. Random chargers tend to be of inferior quality because the devices they are charging have an integrated battery that filters any noise and prevents shutdowns from temporary spikes. The usb power source being unreliable is basically the biggest reason why SD cards get corrupted in raspberry pis.

There is also the obvious problem the initial batch of the Raspberry Pi 4 suffered from. The Raspberry Pi foundation does not test their SBCs with anything other than the official PSU.

My dad had a really cool "universal laptop charger". It had a dial on the brick that set the voltage from like 3 to 30 volts, and then it had about 20 different tips, so it could power just about anything.

Using USB plug for power makes sense so long as cables and power sources for other device can be reused. I suppose they don’t expect that to be the case.

The current that can be drawn by a fully loaded machine can overcome what's reasonable via a mainstream USB cable. Even on the RPi, I've had to bring power in via the GPIO in order to run a USB powered hard drive on the other side.

An amusing but possibly obscure benefit of higher voltage is being able to run a mainstream audio amplifier from the same power supply. My "home stereo" presently requires two power supplies for this reason.

Appears to be the same chip as the ROCKPro64 (Rockchip RK3399 SOC with Mali T860 MP4 GPU) from Pine64.

https://www.pine64.org/rockpro64/

Sounds like a reason to avoid this product.

Why is that?

Old kernels, flaky support. I have a rockpro64 that I was trying to use as a router to my mobile hotspot. The board would freeze up randomly (daily/weekly) until I stopped using the WiFi entirely.

There are exactly two kernels that I have gotten to work and they are both within a few minor revs of each other. This was an issue because I wanted to use newer firewall primitives which weren’t available in that kernel release.

I purchased a tinkerboard and the situation got much worse. Just getting it to boot with a display took a few days of tinkering (lives up to its name) because my hdmi display wasn’t quite what it expected. Once I finally did boot and login, I tried updating ala apt-get and then rebooted. It never came back even with some putzing so I threw it on the junk pile.

Also: I pinged tinkerboard support initially to get tips on why it might not be booting. Going on almost a year now and I’ve had no response.

I got excited for a second thinking the wifi/bluetooth module was an M.2 slot.

I'm guessing we'll have to wait a couple of years yet to get a few more PCI-E lanes and an M.2 slot on a Pi or equivalent.

There's the Odyssey [1]. A bit larger than a Pi, two M.2 slots, GPIO, x86 based with programmable ARM coprocessor. But it's much more expensive at $188.

https://www.seeedstudio.com/ODYSSEY-X86J4105800-p-4445.html

That's really nice, thank you for the link!

I keep meaning to get an x86 "TV-box" that is small like that. Able to run Win10 and stream movies both locally and remotely. And stream Steam games that need a beefier PC.

That’s an M.2 though?

I guess I meant M.2 disk. Although, are you saying I could take out the wifi module and replace it with a disk module? Cool!

M.2/NGFF doesn’t mean SSD, anything that goes into that slot is an M.2 card, whether it’s keyed A or B or M. Like miniPCIe and not like mSATA.

I'll contain my excitement until Asus releases it's price.

A Raspberry Pi competitor that's marginally better in some limited aspects isn't worth much if charges a hefty premium.

Agreed, the Pi does so well because of that lower price.

It is an M2 slot. This is the part in there [1] and it uses M2 slot.

1. https://techship.com/products/azurewave-aw-cm389ma/

I mistakenly thought it was wifi-only slot, but if you can indeed plug a disk in, that's pretty awesome.

"M.2" doesn't mean "place where you can install an SSD". The wireless board is an M.2 board.

I personally think the Raspberry Pi layout is awful. Power, audio/video and 2 USB ports should be on one side and the SD and 2 USB ports on the other side is way it should be.

Has any company created a pin-compatible clone of the Raspberry Pi Zero? I've got some projects that use the Zero but the hardware is starting to feel slow.

Aren't all of the RPi's pin compatible with one another to some extent?

Granted, it depends on what kind of hardware and what you're doing with it, but for my DIY stuff, I've preferred to create peripherals that use a microcontroller and interface via USB. This lets me program and test the peripheral on a desktop PC, and use it in both worlds if I want to. Plus, it's easy to spin up real time functionality on an MCU that's not trying to run a full blown OS. I use one of the many MCU boards that's programmed via the Arduino environment, but that's certainly not obligatory.

What gets me about the Zero is that dev for it has some really annoying roadbumps where the right answer always seems to be "patch the image" rather than providing what seem like fairly obvious things you'd want on a Zero-form-factor device. Is there much work coming out of the foundation to improve the Zero ecosystem, or do you think we've had our lot?

Can someone please release a board with official first class citizen ChromeOS support? ASUS has so many Chromebooks, surely they can do that?

If you want to run Chrome OS on something roughly Pi-sized, why not just get a Chromebox?

I guess price is the main issue, they aren't cheaper than Chromebooks themselves. What contributes to it is that they all come with Intel processors AFAIK

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chromebox

ASUS Chromebit is/was close to what I want though, but it might be pretty slow since it's from 2015 and close to EOL.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chromebit

I bought the first Tinkerboard for streaming to my TV.

Pretty nice piece of hardware, but I could only get the streaming acceleration working with TinkerOS.

In the end I replaced it with a FireTV stick, because the Silk browser was good enough for my streaming requirements and the update process was nicer.

But I thought of using it with RetroPi again.

> An additional DisplayPort 1.2 output is provided via the USB C port.

For me this was the missing feature from the latest RPi. If on top of that the board can run a vanilla Linux kernel (the RPi can't from what I understand), I'm definitely buying one.

The RPi can, actually. Vanilla Debian 11 works fine. Only catch is you need to copy the bootloader and firmware (available in official GH repos) to the EFI partition. No need to patch the kernel, though.

What cameras do these work with? I'm really hoping for some board of this form factor to support a larger sensor than the Pi HQ camera which isn't that HQ at all.

It's using a Rockchip RK3399 anyone know much about it?

Is it more or less documented than the Raspberry PI SoCs?

Like for instance does it require a custom kernel?

That's the same chip in the Pinebook Pro, which is gaining popularity. Support isn't at the same level as Raspberry Pi, but the community is actively working on it.

Not my field, but saw it's also being used on this[1] dev board. They claim support for Ubuntu 18.04, not sure if that's a good sign or not...

[1]: https://www.friendlyarm.com/index.php?route=product/product&...

The first gen had a Mali GPU, and its driver code was propriatery. It caused me a lot of headache in trying to use tinkerboard as a media player.

Current Tinkerboard is double the price of the Pi.

So not very price-competitive.

Price?

What we need is a SBC with two ethernet ports.

Macchiatobin?

The Tinkerboard has USB3, just use any one of the Linux supported USB3 to Ethernet adapters for sale out there and you can have multiple Ethernet interfaces.

You can even get N-BaseT USB3 adapters these days, and USB3 has the bandwidth. You may quibble about connecting Ethernet over USB3, but it works quite well in my experience.

NanoPi R2S https://www.friendlyarm.com/index.php?route=product/product&...

New version in the works based on the same RK3399 chip as the Tinkerboard from the article.

NanoPi R4S https://www.cnx-software.com/2020/11/12/nanopi-r4s-headless-...

Re: nanopi

Thank you. I will add this to my list of candidate devices for a “network slug”.[1]

[1] http://kozubik.com/pub/NetworkSlug/tip.html

If you get one, get one with the metal case. They get rather hot (and throttle) without a big heatsink.

Haven't had a chance to run my R2S in production yet but it can do >930Mb/s in iperf3 on both ports, so that's a start.

Also Rock Pi E.

I really like the idea of competition in the space, but I personally would really like and prefer to see x86 in the small form factor computer market. This is for a few reasons, one of which is I would like to keep a unification of my environments. On that note, I compiled a list and determined my favorite of the existing x86 ones and some of them are quite impressive if a bit pricier. (sorry mobile or Id find and post it)

Also, one thing I learned when supporting genetic sequencers is thatresource hungry embedded machines often use powerful laptop series mbs/cpus, and you can often find those inside laptops that are broken at a great price to value ratio.

I'd like to see your list if you ever happen to find it again.

I don't have the list right now, but I took the time to just search based on memory and came up with this:

The UDOO boards seemed to have the most promise to me, and topped the list. [1,2] UP Squared also looked pretty interesting, if a bit anemic. [3] LattePanda's have some nice engineering but you pay for it. [4] I hadn't heard of the Rock Pi X before but it seems like a neat possibility... so yeah, thats a quick version of it. I am pretty sure I had settled on the UDOO's but need to revisit my logic, especially after seeing the nice cooling and form factor stuff on the LattePandas. I worked with a few industrial fanless pc's in the past I was also thinking about but those are a bit out of scope of discussion I suppose.

1. https://shop.udoo.org/udoo-x86-ii-ultra.html

2. https://shop.udoo.org/udoo-bolt-v8.html

3. https://up-shop.org/up-squared-series.html

4. https://www.lattepanda.com/products

Intel announced for next year the first Atoms that would fit in a small board since 2016. I don't think they would have anything that competes with the rk3399 on price/performance.

Have you checked out the Atom Pi? It's an X86 Atom processor, it has a bunch of drawbacks, like no power connector (you have to use the back of board 40pin header), but they are usually around $35.

I haven't because I was looking for something a bit more powerful, but I'll have to check it out (I have a few small things that could use something a bit underpowered). The nicest thing about lower power stuff is powering it off solar is much easier.

All Edisons apparently have been a failure, so most likely Intel won't be pursuing it.

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