ASUS Tinker Edge R: Raspberry Pi competitor with an NPU and an RK3399 Pro SoC launches

ASUS has started selling the Tinker Edge R, a larger alternative to the Tinker Board 2S. Revealed in 2020, ASUS actually showcased the Tinker Edge R at Computex 2019. While the latter utilised the Rockchip RK3399, the former relies on the more powerful Rockchip RK3399 Pro. Unsurprisingly, the Tinker Edge R is slightly more expensive than the Tinker Board 2S, but not just because of its improved chipset.

Specifically, the Rockchip RK3399 Pro is a hexa-core SoC with two ARM Cortex-A73 cores clocked at 1.8 GHz, plus four Cortex-A53 cores that can reach 1.4 GHz. Additionally, Rockchip has included a Mali-T860 MP4 GPU running at 800 MHz and an NPU that offers up to 30 TOPS of performance. Moreover, ASUS complements the RK3399 Pro with 2 GB of LPDDR4 dual-channel RAM, plus a further 1 GB of LPDDR3 for the chipset’s NPU.

Alternatively, ASUS sells another memory configuration with 4 GB of LPDDR4 RAM and 2 GB LPDDR3 for the NPU. Separately, the Tinker Edge R comes with 16 GB of eMMC flash storage, a micro SD card slot a mPCIe slot for LTE modems. Accordingly, ASUS has included a nanoSIM card slot for LTE connectivity. Also, the Tinker Edge R has a 40-pin GPIO header like many SBCs.

Currently, the Tinker Edge R is available from US$179 with 3 GB of RAM on AliExpress. However, the SBC rises to around US$220 for the 6 GB RAM variant. The latter is also listed on Amazon (affiliate link) but for US$249.99, including shipping.