ASUS Tinker Board Is An Interesting ARM SBC For About $60 USD

[Michael]

What about the Xu4 ? Comparing A15 with A17 would be neat ...

Don't have it, which is why it wasn't included.

[blackshard]

Well the tinkerboard has an A17 which is out of order, much more powerful than the A53 featuring in the RPI or the Pine64. And you cannot add more memory on those boards. So 64-bits does not matter much. The Pentium-3 remained competitive for a while against Pentium-4 for a while.

Good point!
ARMv8 A53 is a replacement for ARMv7 A7, but as we can all see from the benchmarks, ARMv8 A53 is far behind, in terms of performance, than ARMv7 A17

[uid313]

No USB 3, no Bluetooth 5, no USB Type-C, no LPDDR4.

For the same price you can get the ODROID-XU4 from HardKernel with 8 cores and USB 3.0.

[Zola]

"Well the tinkerboard has an A17 which is out of order, much more powerful than the A53 featuring in the RPI or the Pine64. And you cannot add more memory on those boards"
kieffer try to take a hold a grip upon yourself.
No one really wants to develop future more 32 bit ARM code it will remain a long living one in embedded space and only there. You can't really compare A17 design to the A53, actually it's most comparable to the A75 (3 way out of order each & from same ARM design division) or to the A72 (A73 is two ways cut down). People think how the A57 whose the worst design ARM ever did but it's not it's a A53 & because of their own internal flows (rev 0 & 1) and their try to make it fixed (A53 erratums) made things even worser as it didn't make it right and made things even worse & cores slower (because of contrast flushing). So we have; RT, softirq & hotplug problems today all because of it. In short most commercially successful design ever ARM made whose & still is a biggest fault in newer microchip history. So if you really want to develop for ARM platform you would need an SoC with only OoO core's & thing like that really still doesn't exist (at least not as a cheap development board). We will see how A55 design will work.

[AndyChow]

No USB 3, no Bluetooth 5, no USB Type-C, no LPDDR4.

For the same price you can get the ODROID-XU4 from HardKernel with 8 cores and USB 3.0.

It's the same price now, but I think the XU4 started off at $179 or so.

It's also not pin-compatible with pi stuff, you need to use a shifter board for that.

This product might be cool if Asus keeps giving updates, but, my experience with them, two years from now they will discontinue it and forget it ever existed. And then you'll never have any other update for their semi-custom OS. Which is a problem with many of these boards, you can't access the bios without some UART voodoo.

[edwaleni]

I benched the Asus Tinker Board a couple of months ago and there is a OpenBenchmarking result where I used Michael's mega SBC test link to aggregate the reults.

https://openbenchmarking.org/result/1705152-RI-1705141KH56

For what its worth, Armbian, https://www.armbian.com/tinkerboard/ has 2 Ubuntu Xenial builds available depending on your requirements if you want to test something other than Debian.

Someone asked about the Up! Board earlier and I have that Atom based SBC as well. It's included in the result file above. I tested it with MATE 1.18 and 4.10 kernel.

[LoveRPi]

This thing will draw 2.3A. The review should mention that 90%+ of the power supplies on the market will not deliver enough current and cause brown outs with this board. They are drawing unacceptable amounts of current on the order of 30% over the MicroUSB connector design spec. Otherwise this board is great except for the lack of ARMv8. You have to use our custom designed power supplies to keep the voltages on the 5V rail over 4.75V.

[mir3x]

Michael, when testing Jetson, you should probably run:
nvpmodel -m 0
./jetson_clock.sh (its in nvidia home directory, it maximizes GPU)

It might happen that 2 cores might be disabled (check dmesg, nvpmodel will enable them, should work after restart too)

[starshipeleven]

Has anyone here used the Up board? I know this article is about sub-$100 ARM boards and this is using an Intel Atom x5-Z8350. At least the 1 GB RAM/16 GB eMMC and 2 GB RAM/16 GB eMMC are sub-$100 (before taxes and shipping). It seems to also be from ASUS through AAEON (makes embedded industrial products for ASUS).

I should buy one by next month, probably a 4GB version.

[edwaleni]

I should buy one by next month, probably a 4GB version.

I got one when they first came out. They are very flexible, but I have had some minor quibbles with it over time.

- Clear Linux just doesn't like eMMC storage. It erases, it partitions, it copies, but refuses to boot. (Let me know if someone gets a different result)
- Windows 10/Windows Server 2012R2 run just fine, but you will get a few "Unknown Devices" due to the handler for several unused HAT pins.
- There is a dummy driver from Up to get them to stop flagging, I haven't tried any 3rd party HAT's yet.
- The USB2 ports are sensitive to voltage changes, I have already burned out 1 of the 4.
- The USB3 requires a dongle cable, and yes you can boot off of it.
- The heat sink on the Atom gets very hot, especially when you run Windows
- I have run a ton of different Ubuntu distros and they all run just fine.

Would make a great pico Server for small business. I wouldn't try to run any demanding graphics on it however.