Asus Tinker Board Creative Sound
Powerful hardware let down by poor software, Asus’ entry into the maker market needs more time in the oven
The success of the Raspberry Pi came out of nowhere. Nobody, not even the Raspberry Pi Foundation itself, could have predicted it selling in such numbers. Following its success, though, it’s no surprise to find rivals popping up from all quarters.
Asus’ entry follows a familiar template: in layout and functionality, the Tinker Board is a near-perfect clone of the Raspberry Pi 3, right down to the 40-pin general-purpose input-output (GPIO) header, four USB ports, and connectors for CSI and DSI peripherals.
Having copied the layout of the Raspberry Pi closely enough to fit in any third-party case, Asus’ team turned their eyes to an area where they felt comfortable competing: specifications. The Tinker Board boasts a 1.8GHz processor to the Pi 3’s 1.2GHz, albeit using the older 32-bit ARM Cortex-A17 cores rather than the new 64-bit Cortex-A53; the memory is doubled to 2GB; the graphics processor has the ability to decode H.264 and H.265 video at resolutions up to 4K; the audio is upgraded to support 24-bit 192KHz playback; and the Ethernet port is upgraded to Gigabit and given a dedicated channel to the processor, rather than sharing a single USB channel as on the Raspberry Pi.
On paper, then, the Tinker Board should easily best the Raspberry Pi in most ways. In raw speed terms, that’s certainly the case: it completed the SysBench CPU benchmark in 31 seconds to the Pi 3’s 49, despite the older CPU cores, while the Linpack benchmark – compiled to take advantage of ARM’s Neon accelerator instructions, present in both the Raspberry Pi 3 and Tinker Board’s processors – reached 1,325 million floating point instructions per second (MFLOPs) to the Pi 3’s 459 MFLOPs.
Sadly, outside raw CPU performance the Tinker Board begins to flounder. The operating system, a mildly modified version of Linaro Linux 8.5, feels barely finished, and the GPIO port itself is functional only in the most basic of ways – and at that only by using libraries, RPi.GPIO and Wiring Pi, ripped from the Raspberry Pi community and modified to allow them to run on non-Pi hardware.
There are more fundamental problems, too. The supposed “Gigabit” Ethernet port connects at full speed but is hobbled by a bottleneck, pushing its actual performance down to 89.6Mbits/sec – no better than the 10/100 port of a Raspberry Pi, despite its direct connection to the CPU. Even then, a mistake in either software configuration or the board’s hardware means it generates a random MAC address on each reboot – preventing the board from being given a static address via DHCP reservation or being properly tracked in a managed network environment.
Even the 4K video playback support, a major string in Asus’ bow, failed to operate properly during testing: while 720p resolution videos would play back perfectly, anything at higher resolutions was a juddering mess even when running Asus’ own build of the Kodi media centre software. Had it worked, the 4K support would only have been partial at best: Asus readily admits that everything aside from hardware-accelerated video is rendered at 1080p (Full HD) and upscaled.
The Tinker Board feels like reasonably mature hardware – the review sample is marked as Revision
“If Asus can get the software up to scratch and provide enough community engagement, the Tinker Board has huge potential”
1.2 – with alpha-quality software. The scant documentation available to early adopters includes the promise of features which simply don’t yet exist, such as hardware pulse width modulation (PWM) for servo and motor control on the GPIO header, and no real sign of when such support might arrive.
Asus says that it’s working to address this, with a raft of supporting and educational materials in the works. That’s great, but I remember similar promises from others trying to break into this space – including VIA, which launched then abandoned its own APC range of single-board computers.
If Asus can get the software up to scratch and provide a similar level of community engagement to the early-years Raspberry Pi Foundation, the Tinker Board has huge potential. At present, though, it’s simply not ready – and at £55 asks too high a premium over the Raspberry Pi 3.
SPECIFICATIONS Quad-core 1.8GHz Rockchip RK3288 Mali-T764 graphics 2GB RAM microSD slot with adapter Gigabit Ethernet 802.11n Wi-Fi Bluetooth 4 4 x USB 2 40-pin GPIO
CSI, DSI, HDMI outputs 3.5mm analogue audio Linaro 8.5 Linux 87 x 58.4 x 18.3mm (WDH) 30g (excluding heatsink)