It doesn’t matter if you want a computer the size of a card, a thumb drive or dice box — there’s a manufacturer out there that has you covered. You can now count ASUS in that mix, with the launch of its “Tinker Board”, a Cortex-powered mini-machine aimed at the Raspberry Pi crowd.

At first glance, it looks like any other card computer… you could even mistake it for a Raspberry Pi. You can clearly see the USB, HDMI and Ethernet ports, along with the CPU — a quad-core ARM Cortex-A17.

The hardware is advertised as supporting 4K, while the Ethernet is Gigabit (compared to the Pi’s 100Mb/s)

board is available in Europe and the UK
£45 ($73)

Asus Tinker Board gives the Raspberry Pi 3 a run for its money
http://techreport.com/news/31309/asus-tinker-board-gives-the-raspberry-pi-3-a-run-for-its-money

Most would say the original Raspberry Pi got the single-board computer craze (SBC) going. Since then, the Raspberry Pi got three major hardware revisions, and the market at large has come up with similar devices in countless flavors, including Orange and Banana. According to Hexus, Asus decided to throw its prodigious engineering muscle into the SBC ring with the cheerfully-named Tinker Board, which one-ups the Raspberry Pi 3 with significant connectivity advantages, double the memory, and higher clock speeds.

The Tinker board is powered by a Rockchip RK3288 SoC based on an ARM Cortex-A17 design and running at 1.8 GHz.

Those interested in an SBC for a home-brewed media playback machine will like the Tinker’s 4K playback support over the HDMI port, via its SoC’s Mali-T764 GPU. Asus says its audio solution is superior to the Pi’s, with support for 24-bit samples at rates up to 192 kHz.

Asus says the Tinker will support Debian Linux and that the device will be able to run the Kodi media software.

ASUS 90MB0QY1-M0EAY0 Tinker Board
http://cpc.farnell.com/asus/90mb0qy1-m0eay0/tinker-board-2gb-1-8ghz-4k-gb/dp/SC14363

What’s Orange Pi Zero？ It’s an open-source single-board computer. It can run Android 4.4, Ubuntu, Debian. It uses the AllWinner H2 SoC