ASUS has launched a brand new entry within the Tinker Board household, although followers could discover its identify considerably acquainted: the Raspberry Pi-inspired Tinker Board 3.
This is not the primary time ASUS has launched the Tinker Board 3: the corporate unveiled the unique mannequin to bear that identify in March final yr, as a considerably bigger tackle the single-board pc than its predecessors — marking a shift away from the maker market with a give attention to industrial automation and embedded computing. By the point the machine hit the market, although, it had been renamed because the Tinker Board 3N — and was adopted by the Tinker Board 3N Plus and 3N Lite in February this yr.
ASUS has introduced, once more, the Tinker Board 3 — this time as a really Raspberry Pi-like design. (📷: Asus)
That little single-letter suffix seems to have left ASUS considering it may possibly recycle the board’s authentic identify for the brand new Tinker Board 3 — which returns to the Raspberry Pi-style footprint related to the household. The brand new board, dropped at our consideration by CNX Software program, brings with it a brand new system-on-chip, shifting from the Tinker Board 3N’s Rockchip RK3568 to the RK3566, giving it 4 Arm Cortex-A55 processor cores operating at as much as 2GHz, an Arm Mali-G52 graphics processor, a video processing unit with 4k60 H.264/H.265/VP9 decode and 1080p60 H.264/H.265 encode, and a neural processing unit rated at 0.8 tera-operations per second (TOPS) of INT8-precision compute.
Elsewhere on the board is a selection of 2GB or 4GB of LPDDR4x reminiscence, a single full-size HDMI 2.0 port supporting as much as 4k60 shows, a four-lane MIPI Show Serial Interface good to 1080p60, a gigabit Ethernet port, one USB 3.0 host and two USB 2.0 hosts, a USB 2.0 Micro-B On-The-Go port working in machine mode solely, and a further USB 2.0 port on a wafer connector. There’s additionally the road’s normal 40-pin general-purpose enter/output (GPIO) header, following the Raspberry Pi pinout although dropping the color-coded pin header of earlier Tinker Board fashions, and an M.2 E-Key slot providing a single PCI Specific Gen. 2 lane and USB 2.0 — which is used, if requested, for an optionally available Wi-Fi and Bluetooth radio module.
The Tinker Board 3 and Tinker Board 3S are equivalent, save for the latter’s inclusion of a 16GB eMMC module. (📷: Asus)
The Tinker Board 3 is joined by a stablemate that additionally has its personal single-letter suffix, although not like the Tinker Board 3N household there’s just one actual distinction: the Tinker Board 3S consists of an on-board 16GB eMMC module for storage, together with the usual microSD card slot. Each fashions embrace analog audio out and in and are powered by a DC barrel-jack connector supporting as much as 19V — and whereas ASUS is not sharing anticipated energy draw, it provides a selection of 45W or 65W energy adapters to go along with it, together with an optionally available Energy-over-Ethernet (PoE) splitter, aluminum heatsink with or with out fan, and warmth spreader.
Extra data on the Tinker Board 3 and Tinker Board 3 S can be found on the ASUS web site; the corporate has not shared pricing, with events requested to ship their necessities throughout for a quote.