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The ASUS Tinker Board is a compelling upgrade from a Raspberry Pi 3 B+

jeffgeerling.com

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Re: The ASUS Tinker Board is a compelling upgrade from a Raspberry Pi 3 B+

#61

Post by wpietri »

franciscop wrote: post #53

"Once an SBC approaches $100 or so, there are other options (like a used Intel core i5 desktop) which offer 10-100x the performance and infinite expansion options" Anyone knows what kind of board he means? I have been searching and it seems that the next step from the pi would be something like the Intel NUC, which is quite a lot more than $100 when considering a full, minimum system build. Edit: totally missed the "…

Searching on ebay for "used Intel core i5 desktop" yields a bunch of cheap options: http://www.ebay.com/bhp/desktop-computers-core-i5

Re: The ASUS Tinker Board is a compelling upgrade from a Raspberry Pi 3 B+

#62

Post by FullyFunctional »

IshKebab wrote: post #6

I don't know. I think I take the Hackaday view that the software and community is way more important than the hardware in this field, and Raspberry Pi has it all.

It completely depends on what you want to do with it. If it involves a some quirky sensors etc then certainly. If the IO is simple and the workload is more traditional server style, then the Raspberry isn't particularity interesting.

Re: The ASUS Tinker Board is a compelling upgrade from a Raspberry Pi 3 B+

#63

Post by Baeocystin »

dtx1 wrote: post #11

I think the main issues with all of these rasbi alternatives is the software. As ... quirky ... as the rasbi is, the software support and optimisation is excellent. There are several speed comparisons on youtube where the rasbi beats a lot of the competition through sheer software optimisation. Honestly, without complete Upstream Kernel support and Open Sourcing of all necessary drivers, none of these Boards is reall…

All I really want is a pi with networking that isn't forced through a USB 2.0 channel. I'm genuinely surprised that this is still an issue, even with their most recent hardware.

Re: The ASUS Tinker Board is a compelling upgrade from a Raspberry Pi 3 B+

#64

Post by Const-me »

craftyguy wrote: post #30
Const-me wrote: post #29

Tinkerboard has amazingly performant GPU. Peak performance is 81.6GFlops, comparable to mid-range desktop GPUs from 2007 (e.g. GeForce 8400 GS had 67 GFlops, GeForce 8600 GT had 114 GFlops). It also supports 4k HDMI output resolution. RPi is more compatible i.e. the software stack supports OpenGL. But for cases where it’s OK to code against GLES, Mali-T764 is awesome. I once used NanoVG to build a very nice looking r…

You mean Mali and not Mail? If so, boooo proprietary GL stacks. It seems like everyone wants to continue to follow PowerVR's lead, which is extremely unfortunate.

Yes, it’s Mali. Thanks for the correction.

Yeah, pretty much all of them are proprietary.

Re: The ASUS Tinker Board is a compelling upgrade from a Raspberry Pi 3 B+

#65

Post by geerlingguy »

ocdtrekkie wrote: post #56
franciscop wrote: post #53

"Once an SBC approaches $100 or so, there are other options (like a used Intel core i5 desktop) which offer 10-100x the performance and infinite expansion options" Anyone knows what kind of board he means? I have been searching and it seems that the next step from the pi would be something like the Intel NUC, which is quite a lot more than $100 when considering a full, minimum system build. Edit: totally missed the "…

"Used Core i5" is not buying a NUC. At least, I don't think there's a huge aftermarket of NUCs at this point. I don't think they sell in the volume that leads to large aftermarkets, like your average Dell business machine. A five year old OptiPlex SFF PC though is available for around $100 or so, and capable of much more than any single-board PC.

> A five year old OptiPlex SFF PC

This is more what I'm talking about; I needed a faster option with much more RAM and a proper SATA SSD for one project. I bought a used Lenovo ThinkCentre for about $80, put in a small SSD I had on hand, upgraded the RAM to 8 GB for $20 (one 4GB stick on eBay), and had an i5 with about 100x better overall performance than a Pi 3 B+ (and maybe 10x more power consumption, so not a bad tradeoff). All-in $100 for me, though if you didn't have an SSD you can pick one up for $35-45 if you just need 32 or 64 GB.

Basically, once you hit the $100 threshold, you have to really ask if an SBC is the right solution—unless you really, really need the small footprint. And if you need I/O for project stuff, an Arduino or similar project board is only a few bucks more and connects via USB.

Re: The ASUS Tinker Board is a compelling upgrade from a Raspberry Pi 3 B+

#66

Post by pishpash »

robhu wrote: post #4

Also of note: Tinkerboard has b/g/n 2.4Ghz wifi. Pi 3B+ also has 802.11ac 5Ghz wifi. Tinkerboard has a superior sound chip, supporting 24-bit, 192kHz audio. Pi 3B+ has a totally garbage mono only analog sound (and presumably fine HDMI digital sound).

RPi is garbage hardware propped up by overcompensated OS support. Sooner or later you regret putting the effort in because it's just mediocre at everything.

Re: The ASUS Tinker Board is a compelling upgrade from a Raspberry Pi 3 B+

#67

Post by Const-me »

2bitencryption wrote: post #52
Const-me wrote: post #29

Tinkerboard has amazingly performant GPU. Peak performance is 81.6GFlops, comparable to mid-range desktop GPUs from 2007 (e.g. GeForce 8400 GS had 67 GFlops, GeForce 8600 GT had 114 GFlops). It also supports 4k HDMI output resolution. RPi is more compatible i.e. the software stack supports OpenGL. But for cases where it’s OK to code against GLES, Mali-T764 is awesome. I once used NanoVG to build a very nice looking r…

does it require codes to unlock native x264 processing, like the RBP does (or did, back when I used it)? Also, does it have hardware support for HEVC? My poor RBP 2 can't handle HEVC at all.

Unfortunately I don’t know. The product I was working on doesn’t need video playback.

Re: The ASUS Tinker Board is a compelling upgrade from a Raspberry Pi 3 B+

#68

Post by geerlingguy »

StudentStuff wrote: post #14
epalmer wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The eMMC for me is worth the price. Too many corrupt SD cards.

I've only ever had corruption issues on Raspi's, versus with the OrangePi's we have in production at customers sites, I have yet to see any mSD card issues. We do screen our Evo+ mSD cards pretty aggressively for issues though! One nice thing about Allwinner based SBCs is the strong development community that mainlines support for their chips in short order. Few other chip vendors have mainline support, which makes t…

This is a common theme in these SBC threads, but I've also had a pretty good experience with microSD cards in the Pi—one time I had corruption after unplugging the Pi.

Two things that are immensely helpful if you want a stable experience with the Pi:

    1. A good power supply.
    2. A good microSD card.
Most cheap power supplies (like those you get free with a phone) don't supply 2A or more consistently, which the newer Pis need to run stable.

And as far as microSD cards go, [I wrote an article on that last week](https://www.jeffgeerling.com/blog/2018/raspberry-pi-microsd-... there's a huge gulf between the best and worst cards, even from name-brand manufacturers.

Re: The ASUS Tinker Board is a compelling upgrade from a Raspberry Pi 3 B+

#69

Post by comboy »

dtx1 wrote: post #11

I think the main issues with all of these rasbi alternatives is the software. As ... quirky ... as the rasbi is, the software support and optimisation is excellent. There are several speed comparisons on youtube where the rasbi beats a lot of the competition through sheer software optimisation. Honestly, without complete Upstream Kernel support and Open Sourcing of all necessary drivers, none of these Boards is reall…

Long story short most other boards are not really cheaper if take into assumption that your time is not free.

Unless you enjoy hours of wtfs googling and trying to figure out why does this thing does not do what you want it to, then you are spending a few hours to save a few bucks. You can judge how rational that is based on your hourly rate. Just because RPi is popular it's way more likely that somebody has already solved given problem for you.

So the only argument would be that other boards are more powerful. Does that really matter in 99% of use cases though?

Re: The ASUS Tinker Board is a compelling upgrade from a Raspberry Pi 3 B+

#70

Post by userbinator »

For something called the "Tinker Board" you'd expect there to be lots of documentation, and for the RK3288, it does not disappoint:

Datasheet: http://opensource.rock-chips.com/images/4/4e/Rockchip_RK3288...

Technical Reference Manual: http://rockchip.fr/RK3288%20TRM/

This is on par with what TI offers for its OMAP series, and a great deal better than anything Broadcom has ever released for its RPi SoCs.

I remember around a decade or so ago, Rockchip was one of the main producers of PMP SoCs, mainly the RK26xx and RK27xx series (Actions was the other popular one), and there was a community around firmware-modding those PMPs, including, appropriately enough, porting RockBox to run on them. It's interesting to see them "growing up" in the market.

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