
Asus Takes on Raspberry Pi with 4K-capable Tinker Board - 0x7fffffff
http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2017/01/asus-tinker-board-price-specs-release-date/
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avian
Previous discussion:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13456357](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13456357)

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StavrosK
The problem I have with these boards that pop up is that they get announced,
they aren't quite compatible with the popular alternative (the Raspberry Pi),
so you buy one and it ends up sitting in a shelf somewhere. I still remember
the whole Intel Edison disaster.

These days, the primary decider of which board I'll use is how big the
ecosystem is. The Raspberry Pi ecosystem (as well as the Arduino ecosystem) is
huge, so that's definitely a big plus. Other alternatives, for example the
ESP8266, that are compatible with the "big player" (in this case the Arduino),
get this advantage for free.

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Florin_Andrei
Exactly.

Also, this new board is a bit too expensive IMO.

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zokier
There isn't a lack of RPi-like SBCs, so Asus needs to do serious amount of PR
and have persistence for long-term presence to stand out.

Here is a random recent list of 90 different competitors:
[http://linuxgizmos.com/table-compares-90-hacker-friendly-
sin...](http://linuxgizmos.com/table-compares-90-hacker-friendly-single-board-
computers/)

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hsivonen
What's the mainline kernel support situation for this SoC? If not mainline
support, what's the kernel security update story?

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russellbeattie
Doesn't look like there's a real time clock and accompanying battery, like
most other boards like this. I wonder why that's left out? It can't cost that
much to add and seems pretty important.

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tyingq
The raspberry pi and beaglebone black don't have one either. This one does
have on board wifi and gigabit Ethernet.

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alrs
This, minus HDMI, plus POE, and I'd be in swoon city.

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dewiz
I see online many negative comments about Rockchip, anyone have numbers or
know how Rockchip would affect development, compared to a RPi?

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alistproducer2
Since I've moved to an all-Kodi household, this is definitely interesting to
me.

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andreiw
So ARMv7-A is still, like, a thing?

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monocasa
It's hard to beat at that gate count.

