"Long live competition." The tech market thrives on it and wilts without it, as we've learned the hard way more than once. The Raspberry Pi changed how we experiment with hardware, but that's also because it hasn't had an opponent with the same popularity and reach. Asus plans to change that with its new Tinker Board, betting on better specifications: double the performance of the Raspberry Pi 3, with double the RAM.
Many enthusiasts prefer to go straight for the Raspberry Pi 3 for performance reasons. One of the most popular projects is the retro console, but reports indicate that PlayStation 1 emulation is something like "the limit" for any RetroPie initiative. This has led users to demand more powerful options, regardless of a slight increase in price. I'm sure a $50 Raspberry Pi with a higher clock speed or a higher core count would have enormous demand. Of course, that depends on several factors, starting with what Broadcom can offer the Raspberry Pi Foundation, and how good the thermal solution is (the Raspberry Pi 3 already gets quite hot on its own). Perhaps the answer will come from another company, and one that seems interested in competing is Asus.
Hardware specifications
The Taiwanese giant presented its new Tinker Board, based on a Rockchip RK3288 SoC. It's a quad-core ARM Cortex-A17 chip at 1.8 GHz, with a Mali GPU that supports 4K playback. The RAM is 2 GB of DDR3L (the Raspberry Pi 3 has 1 GB of LPDDR2), it has a microSD card slot paired with an SDIO 3.0 interface (meaning read/write should be a bit faster), four USB ports, Gigabit Ethernet, an HDMI port, WiFi n with the option to replace the antenna, and a total of 40 pins that appear to have partial compatibility with the Raspberry Pi 3. We also found connectors for cameras and compact displays, a 3.5mm audio output, and a micro USB port that powers the whole system (5V at 2A).
Pricing and availability
The technical details were distributed via slides, but Asus's official page has nothing yet. In fact, we don't even know the price. Asus promises double the performance compared to the Raspberry Pi 3, and we're supposed to be able to install Debian without issues. That guarantees the execution of the most important packages (with RetroPie at the forefront), however, Asus must not lose sight of two critical details: cost and availability.
