Asus Tinker Board 2 receives an RK3399 Upgrade

Asus is looking forward to upgrading their open-spec, community-backed Tinker Board SBC with the new Tinker Board 2. It advances from a quad-core, Cortex-A17 Rockchip RK3288 to a Hexa-core -A72 and -A53 Rockchip RK3399. It comes with support for 4GB LPDDR4, GbE, WiFi/BT, optional 16GB eMMC, 3x USB, Type-C with DP, HDMI, and MIPI-DSI/CSI.

Tinker Board 2 has 85 x 56mm dimensions and 40-pin GPIO. It uses the RK3399K, which has the dual A72 cores to 2.0GHz and the four A53 cores to 1.5GHz. There is also Arm Mali-T860 MP4 GPU handling the graphic computation loads. As claimed by Asus, the new Tinker Board 2 will have a 1.5x performance jump than the previous gen.

There will also be another option for the consumer to buy the Tinker Board 2S model. Just like the last generation, we saw Tinker Board S. It adds an extra 16GB eMMC to the base Tinker Board 2 model. The Tinker Board 2 runs Debian 9, probably via Asus’ Tinker OS, with Android 10 support promised by Q1 2021. The board offers 2GB or 4GB LPDDR4. It supplies a microSD slot in addition to the optional eMMC. The SBC offers a native GbE port, and the wireless module has 802.11ac with Bluetooth 5.0, supported by a 2T2R (MIMO) swappable antenna.

It comes with an HDMI 2.0 port with 4K@60Hz and CEC. The SBC replaces the micro-USB port with a USB 3.2 Gen1 Type-C OTG port with DisplayPort 1.2 support. The Tinker Board 2 I/O options include the support for 3x USB 3.2 Gen1 host ports. Instead of using 5V USB power found in the Tinker Board, the Tinker Board 2 has a 12-19V DC barrel jack. RTC, a DC fan header, and power-on and recovery headers are available on the board.

There are other niche versions of Tinker Boards like Tinker Edge R (now available for $217 at Amazon) Pico-ITX SBC based on the AI-enabled RK3399Pro. There is also a Tinker Edge T SBC that runs Linux on the same Coral SOM module found on Google’s Coral Dev Board, equipped with an i.MX8M and an Edge TPU.

No pricing or availability information was published for the Tinker Board 2 yet. It will probably ship by Q1 next year.

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