Asus Tinker Edge T SBC : New Raspberry Pi-alternative focuses on AI dev

30th January 2020 Harshvardhan Mishra

Recently ASUS has officially unveiled its next single-board computer “ASUS Tinker Edge T SBC”. 8 months ago, Asus unveiled its a SBC with an NXP i.MX8M 1.5 GHz ARM Cortex-A53 quad-core processor and Google’s Coral Edge TPU system-on-module for AI. ASUS introduced the Tinker Edge T in mid-2019, and now it has formally announced its latest SBC. The Edge T expands upon the Tinker Board, which was already a powerful Raspberry Pi competitor.

The new Tinker Edge are aimed at hardware & software developers looking to do machine learning on a budget without relying on cloud computing.

While the SBC looks a bit like a Raspberry Pi, But ASUS add Google’s AI hardware helps set it apart, as well as 2 USB 3.2 Gen 1 Type-A ports, and a USB 3.2 Gen 1 Type-C port. It has full-sized Gigabit Ethernet and HDMI ports, 1GB of LPDDR4 memory, 8GB of eMMC flash storage, a microSD card reader, 802.11ac WiFi and Bluetooth 4.2. It has 40-pin Raspberry Pi-compatible header and the whole thing is about the size of a Raspberry Pi, at 85mm a 56mm (3.3″ x 2.2″). It has a MIPI-DSI interface for connecting displays and touchscreens, two MIPI-CSI interfaces for connecting cameras, along with an obligatory GPIO header.

The company has designed the SBC for AI applications, with the SBC having a Google Edge TPU onboard. Google has optimised the Edge TPU for machine learning and should allow the Tinker Edge T to perform up to four tera operations per second (TOPS) at only 0.5 W. The presence of the Edge TPU should make it easy for the SBC to learn and execute algorithms.

ASUS is still yet to announce global availability or pricing for the Tinker Edge T, but Japanese retailer Physical Computing offers an insight into pricing. The retailer is currently selling the SBC for 21,600 JPY excluding taxes, which equates to roughly US$200.