There is no denying that Raspberry Pi took the 'Do It Yourself" community by storm. However, what Raspberry Pi lacks in other heavy tasks, Asus barges in through the DIY door and makes up for it with the new Tinker Board.
The "Asus 90MB0QY1-M0EAY0 Tinker Board" or just the "Asus Tinkerboard" is currently available for you to buy in the UK and Europe. Shipping is expected to start in February. It sits at about 46 pounds or 57 USD. To compare, Raspberry Pi 3 Model B, is sold for about 35 USD to 40 USD.
The Tinker Board happens to sport a similar size to the Pi. However, what is gaining a lot of attention is its quad-core 1.8GHz Rockchip RK3288 SoC processor that is complete with the ability to play 4K video, instead of just 1080p and 192kHz / 24-bit audio. According to the UK page, the Board also runs on a variant of Debian Linux and supports Kodi for around-the-home media streaming, quite the same to Raspberry Pi. Users will also need to load the OS onto an SD card and will want you to supply your own five volts, two amp power supply. The Raspberry Pi 3 Model B, however, is prepared with a 64-bit Cortex A53 quad-core processor. Tinker Board's A17 will only support 32-bit. A nice 2 GB worth of DDR3 memory is also thrown in, a step up to 1 GB from the Raspberry Pi Model 3 B.
The 4K video support which includes H.265 decoding is all thanks to the Mali-T764 GPU found within the quad-core. Mali-T764 GPU has more power compared to the Broadcom VideoCore IV found inside the Pi 3. In addition, users can expect Bluetooth 4.0, four USB 2.0 ports, an HDMI out, a microSD port, gigabit Ethernet, and swappable antennas for its 802.11b/g/n Wi-Fi.
