The Asus Tinker Board line of single-board computers are hacker-friendly devices aimed at developers looking to build IoT (Internet of Things) applications, among other things. They’re basically the Asus version of Raspberry Pi devices and they’ve been around since 2017.

Up until now all Tinker Board models have been powered by ARM-based processors. But the new Asus Tinker V bucks the trend: it’s the company’s first model with a 64-bit RISC-V processor.

It’s not a particularly powerful RISC-V chip. At the heart of the Tinker V is a Renesas RZ/Five processor with a 1 GHz Andes AX45MP single-core RISC-V processor.

The board has 1GB of DDR4 memory, a microSD card slot for storage and optional support for a 16GB eMMC module and SPI flash.

Ports include:

  • 2 x GbE Ethernet
  • 1 x micro USB
  • 1 x micro USB (OTG)
  • 2 x CAN Bus (6-pin terminal block)
  • 2 x COM RS-232 (5-pin terminal block)

There’s also a 20-pin GPIO header and JTAG debug pin header and a DC power input jack.

Asus says the board support Debian and Yocto Linux operating systems.

There’s no word on pricing or availability yet, but Asus is showing off the Tinker V, as well as other IoT products, at the Embedded World show in Germany this week.

You can add the Tinker V to a growing list of single-board computers with RISC-V chips. Others are available at a variety of price point sand capabilities, including the StarFive VisionFive 2, Pine64 0x64, Sipeed Lichee Pi 4A, MangoPi MQ Pro, Allwinner Nezha, and HiFive Unmatched. And then there are several more models coming this year, including the Pine64 Star64 and Intel Horse Creek/SiFive HiFive Pro P550.

press release

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5 replies on “Asus Tinker V is the company’s first single-board PC with a RISC-V chip”

  1. It doesn’t support Debian; in fact the chip in it violates the RISC-V spec for memory translation and has a magic address range that bypasses it even for unprivileged userspace. This virtual address range overlaps the default base address for position-dependent executables in both GNU binutils and LLVM LLD, so any position-dependent executable built in the past however many years cannot run on it.

    Supporting this thing requires extremely ugly hacks to paper over a gross non-compliance, and a rebuild of an entire distribution to not link at a problematic address; whilst many executables are position independent these days, not all of them are.

  3. The year of the RISC-V SBC!

    It’s great to see RISC-V edging closer towards the consumer electronics market, and with it, open source operating systems.

    This is the first board from a big name OEM though, as far as I know.

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