ASUS has unveiled the Tinker Board 2 and Tinker Board 2S, its latest single-board computers (SBCs) designed to challenge the Raspberry Pi. The Tinker Board 2 and Tinker Board 2S have a Rockchip RK3399 chipset, up to 4 GB of dual-channel LPDDR4 RAM and plenty of connectivity. The Tinker Board 2S comes with 16 GB of eMMC storage too, though.
https://www.notebookcheck.net/ASUS-releases-two-new-Tinker-Board-SBCs-to-take-on-the-Raspberry-Pi.505391.0.html
Now heres the real question, are they going to have the same problem as before and have close to 0 support for the board? The thing that keep the Pi above pretty much any other SOC is the support/community behind it. ASUS seems content on burning money, though.
Seems like yet another RK3399 based board. As with ALL the others, there'll probably be zero GPU support, so no hardware video acceleration, unless you use Android, which is rubbish if you want a board to, er, tinker on!
My problem with this and articles like it is the claim to challenge Raspberry Pi when typically they are underpowered from previous Pi versions, equally powered at twice the price or completely beyond tinkering like an SBC that's a compete Intel computer for $1499. The RPi 4B in 2, 4 & 8GB significantly upped the level and on the heels of that announcement comes the RPi400 which is a 64 bit, quad core processor running at 1.8 GHz all built into its own keyboard for $70. For an additional $30 you can get everything except the monitor; mouse, power supply SD card preburned with OS, HDMI cable. Unless Tinkerboard is going to sell for less than $45, RPi will beat it hands down in performance, price and third party support. Putting out a challenge board will only serve those people who hate a leader at any cost
The WHOLE point of a Raspberry Pi is the fact that you can buy 3 - 4 of them at once without breaking the bank, when you can find a sbc that is in that price range that even comes CLOSE to the performance of a Raspberry PI let me know. I suspect that day will never come, Raspberry Pi is at the top of its game and there are no contenders.
Nevermind Pi beating it on cost (for some SBC 'collectors', price may not be an issue); software support is key and Ubuntu is still in its infancy on ARM, while Raspbian OS has plenty of community support. I'm not going to pay double to deal with a board that has software that doesn't *quite* work the way it is supposed to work.
Ubuntu is fine on arm. I've been using it 4-ever. We use odroids on desktops.
The Tinkerboard 2 looks like it has some nice features that might appeal to an engineer wanting to use it for an industrial control application. Having said that, Avnet has a Pi derived controller that comes in a DIN rail enclosure, has: RTC, CAN bus, opto-isolated I/O pins, eMMC drive and a PCI connector. The Avnet IIOT costs only a little more than a bare Tinker board. If I were doing a few dozen embedded systems for a contract, then it might be a horse race, but I'd be inclined to give the nod to the Avnet IIOT: the IIOT has less CPU horse power but it has a larger pool of already developed software and the I/O is ready to go as is. If I were doing an embedded product that were to sell in the thousands+, a PI 4 with appropriate HATs would probably be a winner because the hardware is less expensive.
For the love of Bob, please break away from the raspberry pi form factor, it's horrible. One with all the connectors on one edge would be so much neater.
Seriously, i'd like to see the standard become more like the compute module, with a range of options for breakout boards, as this could allow the devices to be used in homebrew devices like tablets and wearables that looked sleek and could compete with retail devices.
I'm with most of the others. The advantage of RPI is the software, support, and cost. If you can't beat all 3 forget it.