Asus Tinkerboard, a new dawn for SBC's?

Sorry to have been quiet for so long, been both working on the book and recovering from illness which in turn caused delay in the book, which in turn meant trying to catch up on the work....I'm falling very behind and have had a few extensions to my deadline but am doing my very best to get back into the groove again.

But I had to post something about this beast



This ordinary looking board may just be the most important new SBC ever released, for 2 important reasons,
1st, its from ASUS, one of the very biggest commercial electronic makers, these guys do everything from full Mother boards to tablets to Video cards...and video cards is kinda interesting.

Their release of an RX3288 power credit card board with a very soft and unheralded launch might mean they are checking out the market.

2nd the use of the RX3288 is in itself interesting, yes its 32bit, but its a very fast 32bit, More than capable of showing a Pi or even an Odroid its clean heels. But it won't be the outright champ, there are a few faster CPU's,
However it is running a Mali 760 series GPU....4 cores.  In theory...that means its capable of running OpenGLES3.2 making it the 1st sub $100 board to be so empowered.

If they are also able to use their experience of video cards to provide full drivers for this board, it will make this the most powerful SBC board available on the market if you are planning to do graphic applications, some of the 64bits will out pace the CPU, but none currently come close to a 760 series GPU.

The launch has been incredibly low key, only 1 supplier in the UK, and sadly they sold out before I could get one. What info I can find so far suggests that they don't really have the software side sorted out, and images are basic, and tellingly lacking in OpenGLES3.2 (or any) drivers....
But I hope that this takes off. If it does we might see all the other makes move up a level in GPU performance and might also see people taking more interest in coding graphically.

I'll let you know when I get my hands on one.

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