ASUS Unveils the Tinker Board 3 — But Not the Original Tinker Board 3, a New Tinker Board 3

ASUS has launched a new entry in the Tinker Board family, though fans may find its name somewhat familiar: the Raspberry Pi-inspired Tinker Board 3.

This isn't the first time ASUS has launched the Tinker Board 3: the company unveiled the original model to bear that name in March last year, as a significantly larger take on the single-board computer than its predecessors — marking a shift away from the maker market with a focus on industrial automation and embedded computing. By the time the device hit the market, though, it had been renamed as the Tinker Board 3N — and was followed by the Tinker Board 3N Plus and 3N Lite in February this year.

That little single-letter suffix appears to have left ASUS thinking it can recycle the board's original name for the new Tinker Board 3 — which returns to the Raspberry Pi-style footprint associated with the family. The new board, brought to our attention by CNX Software, brings with it a new system-on-chip, shifting from the Tinker Board 3N's Rockchip RK3568 to the RK3566, giving it four Arm Cortex-A55 processor cores running at up to 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 choice of 2GB or 4GB of LPDDR4x memory, a single full-size HDMI 2.0 port supporting up to 4k60 displays, a four-lane MIPI Display 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 operating in device mode only, and an additional USB 2.0 port on a wafer connector. There's also the line's usual 40-pin general-purpose input/output (GPIO) header, following the Raspberry Pi pinout though dropping the color-coded pin header of earlier Tinker Board models, and an M.2 E-Key slot offering a single PCI Express Gen. 2 lane and USB 2.0 — which is used, if requested, for an optional Wi-Fi and Bluetooth radio module.

The Tinker Board 3 is joined by a stablemate that also has its own single-letter suffix, though unlike the Tinker Board 3N family there's only one real difference: the Tinker Board 3S includes an on-board 16GB eMMC module for storage, along with the standard microSD card slot. Both models include analog audio in and out and are powered by a DC barrel-jack connector supporting up to 19V — and while ASUS isn't sharing expected power draw, it offers a choice of 45W or 65W power adapters to go with it, along with an optional Power-over-Ethernet (PoE) splitter, aluminum heatsink with or without fan, and heat spreader.

More information on the Tinker Board 3 and Tinker Board 3 S are available on the ASUS website; the company has not shared pricing, with interested parties asked to send their requirements across for a quote.