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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+

#41

Post by bsder »

pritambaral wrote: post #34
bsder wrote: post #23

Is there a reason why everybody just HAS to stick to the RPi's when the BeagleBone Black/Green/Blue/etc. are: 1) Far more open (you can get documentation and chip supply to build your own BeagleBone) 2) No more expensive 3) Mainline Debian

1) Is actually more expensive than RPi 3s; and 2) Hasn't been updated in a while; thus 3) Lower RAM; 4) Lower perf;

> 1) Is actually more expensive than RPi 3s; and

The RPi people quote this incessantly casually leaving out the fact that the BeagleBone already includes 4GB eMMC (a uSD card is at least $5)

> 3) Lower RAM; > 4) Lower perf;

Less RAM but FASTER RAM. RPi3 is DDR2 vs BeagleBone Black's DDR3.

So, between the eMMC being much faster than uSD and the faster RAM (and the Ethernet on the BBB is way faster), I suspect that the BeagleBone Black probably performs better for most workloads.

In addition, people just blithely skip past the whole closed nature of the Broadcom SoC. If you are serious about creating a product ever shipping in real quantities, that's a killer.

It disappoints me greatly that people never seem to have a genuinely good answer for this when I ask.

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

#42

Post by toopsss »

BlackLotus89 wrote: post #12
steeve wrote: post #8

There are plenty of boards that are much more powerful than the RPi and have comparable price (ODROID-C2 comes to mind). But the devil is in wether or not they run the mainline Linux kernel. I have several ODROID-C2 that I have replaced with RPis because of the poor hardware support (Amlogic kernel was way late at the time, may still is). Stick to mainline.

I got my odroid c2 running with the rc kernel for a while now. There were some problems at first, but it now runs my home automation and DHCP server without a hitch. I'm running archlinuxarm btw but I will soon try voidlinux as well on it (I tried kodi as well and it kinda could play h256 in software, but I now stick to my raspberry pi as a media center)

You’ve gotta mean hardware. There is no way that arm chip could do h265 at any useful speed. The amlogic in the c2 can do hardware h265 (not hdr) and it works with Kodi. I use one this way and have been overall pleased with it though especially since I didn’t buy the board for this in the first place. It was a repurpose. I would only get something with 10 bit these days if media is the primary concern.

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

#43

Post by andrewstuart »

vardump wrote: post #40
andrewstuart wrote: post #18

Whether or not ever more powerful Raspberry Pi computers is a good thing depends on why you are using them. If you're wanting to put it to some practical application then probably more power is better. If, like me, it's a hobby, and you enjoy the idea of tiny machines, and the challenge of pushing a computer to do things a resource constrained environment, then tiny and powerful machines like RPi that can run full Li…

> So for the hobbyist wanting to be challenged, tiny machines/CPUs like the esp8266 and esp32 are where the fun is really at. While I agree with you, ESP32 is over 1000 times more powerful than C64 and has more RAM than unexpanded Amiga 500. (Can't wait when my ESP32 arrives in mail soon. :-)) Doom for ESP32 (running from RAM connected over SPI of all things...!): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gb_JFDa0AIo

True, although I'm not saying that the mentioned chips have the power of 1970's CPU's, only that their unique capabilities/configurations make them more interesting and fun to play with than a Raspberry Pi for example (for my purposes, which is fun).

For example the esp32 only has 520 KiB SRAM - that imposes constraints.

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

#44

Post by throwaway2048 »

bsder wrote: post #41
pritambaral wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1) Is actually more expensive than RPi 3s; and 2) Hasn't been updated in a while; thus 3) Lower RAM; 4) Lower perf;

> 1) Is actually more expensive than RPi 3s; and The RPi people quote this incessantly casually leaving out the fact that the BeagleBone already includes 4GB eMMC (a uSD card is at least $5) > 3) Lower RAM; > 4) Lower perf; Less RAM but FASTER RAM. RPi3 is DDR2 vs BeagleBone Black's DDR3. So, between the eMMC being much faster than uSD and the faster RAM (and the Ethernet on the BBB is way faster), I suspect that the…

RPI has mainline kernel support for all its components, pretty much every other ARM devices has at least a closed source GPU driver, meaning you are going to be stuck on some old kernel forever eventually.

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

#45

Post by dogma1138 »

dtx1 wrote: post #26

Has anyone got any experience with this one? http://www.hardkernel.com/main/products/prdt_info.php?g_code... I'm thinking about buying two of them and using them as a NAS with offsite mirroring for critical data/important documents.

If you are building NAS for critical data just get a proper NAS board.

If you don’t want to go for an embedded X86 then this one is a good option it comes with ECC memory and decent enough crypto acceleration for full encryption.

https://kobol.io/helios4/

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

#46

Post by throw2016 »

I looked at the Tinkerboard when it was released but it is limited to USB 2.0. The Rock64 is a better option with the same SOC as the Tinkerboard but USB 3.0 ports and decent Linux support.

Even more interesting Odroid is releasing a new board the N1 based on the Rockchip 3399 SOC that has 2 A72 + 4 A53 processors. It also has 2 SATA ports, USB 3.0 and 2 Gigabit lan ports. And Odroid software support is significantly better than most other vendors except the Pi.

Their previous C2 board based on the Amlogic 905 was a great buy at $45 and plays 4k content without missing a beat while my kabylake desktop on Linux seems to struggle.

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

#47

Post by BlackLotus89 »

toopsss wrote: post #42
BlackLotus89 wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I got my odroid c2 running with the rc kernel for a while now. There were some problems at first, but it now runs my home automation and DHCP server without a hitch. I'm running archlinuxarm btw but I will soon try voidlinux as well on it (I tried kodi as well and it kinda could play h256 in software, but I now stick to my raspberry pi as a media center)

You’ve gotta mean hardware. There is no way that arm chip could do h265 at any useful speed. The amlogic in the c2 can do hardware h265 (not hdr) and it works with Kodi. I use one this way and have been overall pleased with it though especially since I didn’t buy the board for this in the first place. It was a repurpose. I would only get something with 10 bit these days if media is the primary concern.

Nope I meant software I don't think h265 hardware decoding is in mainline yet (could be wrong thought)

And yes I explicity tested software decoding and my 720p sample played without noticeable delay/framedrop and 1080p was uhm kinda running.

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

#48

Post by bsder »

throwaway2048 wrote: post #44
bsder wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 1) Is actually more expensive than RPi 3s; and The RPi people quote this incessantly casually leaving out the fact that the BeagleBone already includes 4GB eMMC (a uSD card is at least $5) > 3) Lower RAM; > 4) Lower perf; Less RAM but FASTER RAM. RPi3 is DDR2 vs BeagleBone Black's DDR3. So, between the eMMC being much faster than uSD and the faster RAM (and the Ethernet on the BBB is way faster), I suspect that the…

RPI has mainline kernel support for all its components, pretty much every other ARM devices has at least a closed source GPU driver, meaning you are going to be stuck on some old kernel forever eventually.

RPI3 was still "blob"-bed as of about a year ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13396625

Have they finally succeeded in pulling all the blob out yet?

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

#49

Post by StudentStuff »

pritambaral wrote: post #32
StudentStuff wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Allwinner based boards have mainline kernel support for most features, they're one of a handful of vendors that has mainline support (primarily due to community efforts). I personally like the OrangePi boards due to price & reliability, easy to set and forget without worrying about mSD corruption. http://linux-sunxi.org/Main_Page is pretty useful for a list of boards and info.

That hasn't been my experience during the design our last product. Allwinner was the vendor we had to pass on because their then-best-offering (H5) had poor mainline support and fragile, crappy code in the kernel dump. We decided to go with the slightly more expensive RPi 3B precisely because it had both usable mainline support and the handful of patches in the RaspberryPi Foundation's kernel were much better written…

We use H3 based boards, but the H5 seems to be fairly mature. I know its been under heavy development wrt mainline kernel support for the last year, might want to take a peek at the status matrix: https://linux-sunxi.org/Linux_mainlining_effort#Status_Matri...

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

#50

Post by throwaway2048 »

bsder wrote: post #48
throwaway2048 wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

RPI has mainline kernel support for all its components, pretty much every other ARM devices has at least a closed source GPU driver, meaning you are going to be stuck on some old kernel forever eventually.

RPI3 was still "blob"-bed as of about a year ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13396625 Have they finally succeeded in pulling all the blob out yet?

the blobs are firmware and booting related, they dont hinder the ability to actually use a new kernel.
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