Hardware manufacturer ASUS has this week announced
the launch of its new ASUS Tinker Board in the United Kingdom after previously
making available throughout the US.
The single-board computer (SBC) has been created to
compete with the likes of the Raspberry Pi and is perfect for creating Internet
of Things, robotic projects and It is compatible with a wide range of leading
SBC chassis and accessories.
The ASUS Tinker Board is now available to purchase
from retailers such as Amazon priced at £ 52. The Asus Tinker Board is a fast
and powerful computer with all the great features of the Raspberry Pi but with
more grunt under the hood. The Asus 90MB0QY1-M0EAY0 Tinker Board is a 8.5cm by
5.3cm single board computer that features a quad-core Arm Cortex A17 CPU
running at 1.8 GHz, ARM Mali-T764 GPU, and 2GB of DDR3 memory. There is hardware
support for H.265 4K decoding instead of just 1080p, almost double the
benchmark score in Geek bench than the Raspberry Pi 3 model B, which should
equate to better 3D performance.
This board has the exact same footprint and
components layout as the Raspberry Pi 3 with an operating system based upon the
same Debian distribution as the Pi OS which supports Kodi for around-the-home
media streaming. This board could be a drop-in replacement for the Raspberry Pi
in many circumstances. The Tinker Board has a fast on-board processor to
increase its operational speed. It also features Wi-Fi and Bluetooth
capabilities to enhance the functionality to allow connection to a variety of
wireless networks, this includes a gigabit Ethernet, support for SDIO 3.0, and
swappable antennas for the built-in 802.11 b/g/n Wi-Fi module.
