ASUS Announces Rockchip RK3399-Powered Tinker Board 2, Tinker Board 2S Single-Board Computers
Company claims up to twice the CPU and GPU performance of the original Tinker Board and Tinker Board S designs.
ASUS has officially announced the latest entries in its Tinker Board family of single-board computers, jumping to the Rockchip RK3399 for a major boost in single- and multithreaded performance over its predecessors: the Tinker Board 2 and Tinker Board 2S.
The original ASUS Tinker Board launched four years ago as a competitor to the Raspberry Pi 3 Model B. Borrowing the same overall layout, including the 40-pin general-purpose input/output (GPIO) header, the board was based on Rockchip's RK3288 Arm Cortex-A17 system-on-chip and boasted 2GB of RAM, gigabit Ethernet connectivity, four USB 2.0 ports, and on-board Wi-Fi and Bluetooth 4.0 radios.
A year later the board saw a refresh to the Tinker Board S, which added a 16GB eMMC storage option alongside the microSD card slot, enhanced I2S capabilities, a new power-on header, and low-voltage input detection on the micro-USB power input — though retained the same RK3288 chip. The Tinker Edge T, meanwhile, added a Google Edge Tensor Processing Unit (TPU) and moved to NXP's iMX 8M — but came at a considerable price premium. Finally, the Tinker Edge R launched with the Rockchip RK3399Pro and Rockchip's Neural Processing Unit (NPU) accelerator.
Now, the Tinker Board 2 and Tinker Board 2S, first spotted by Clubic, aim to sit somewhere between the Tinker Board S and the Tinker Edge R. In both cases, the original RK3288 has been replaced by an RK3399 offering two Arm Cortex-A72 cores at 2GHz and four Cortex-A53 cores at 1.5GHz and an Arm Mali-T8640 MP4 graphics processor running at 800MHz.
Depending on model, the new boards come with 2GB of 4GB of LPDDR4 dual-channel RAM plus 16GB of eMMC flash storage on the Tinker Board 2S variant. There's a single HDMI 2.0 output with 4k60 support, a four-lane MIPI DSI connector, DisplayPort 1.2 connectivity via a new USB Type-C port, three USB 3.2 Gen. 1 ports, a MIPI CSI connector, Wi-Fi 5 2T2R and Bluetooth 5.0 on an M.2 module, a real-time clock battery header, the same 40-pin GPIO header as before, and a 12-19V DC jack for power input — pointing to a board which has become too power-hungry to be driven from a micro-USB port as before.
ASUS has confirmed that the board will come with Android 10 support, suggesting a planned release in the first quarter of next year, though has yet to offer a firm launch date and confirmed pricing. Interested parties can find out more on the official Tinker Board website.