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

My experience so far with the ASUS Tinker Board has been pleasant. Of course, most of my interest with ARM SBCs resides with the benchmarking. The Tinker Board offers good performance considering its price tag of about $60 USD.

ARM SBC boards for this performance comparison included the Banana Pi M3, ODROID-C1, ODROID-C2, Orange Pi One, Orange Pi PC, Orange Pi Plus, PINE 64+, Raspberry Pi 2 Model B, and Raspberry Pi 3 Model B. While significantly more expensive than these other ARM SBCs, the Jetson TX1 and TX2 are also included for additional reference points on the ARM high-end. Each ARM SBC was tested with its respective official OS images.

The Tinker Board tends to be the fastest of the ARM boards tested at Phoronix but not counting the more expensive Jetson TX1/TX2 developer boards. (Note the same CFLAGS/CXXFLAGS were used across all platforms during testing, just not shown on the smaller bars due to no room to print.)

In the multi-threaded John The Ripper, the Tinker Board fell behind the Banana Pi M3. The Banana Pi M3 as a reminder is an octa-core ARM SBC using older Cortex-A7 cores, but for some multi-threaded tests can beat out the quad-core design of the TInker Board.

Though with the C-Ray multi-threaded ray-tracer, the four Cortex-A17 cores are enough to put it right behind the Jetson developer boards.

The ODROID-C2 is competing with its 1.5GHz quad-core Cortex-A53 design.