The Parallella Board vs ASUS Tinker Board

The Parallella Board makes use of the Epiphany III coprocessor which is invisible to the OS unless directly addressed through its APIs. It currently boasts 32 gigaflops from its 16-core variant with a promise of 100 gigaflops for a 64-core model which will be available in the future.

Although not a beefy FPGA, the price is right

High performance, energy-efficient floating point capable, general purpose RISC cores

The Parallella is a great board for programmers to experiment programmin on ARM, FPGA and the Epiphany architecture in one compact package.

Parallella uses open source hardware. The drivers are released as open source as well. All the details about the board designs and schematics can be found on GitHub.

Parallella ships with several open source tools geared towards developing for the Epiphany architecture. Some of these tools include a C compiler, Eclipse, OpenCL SDK/compiler and runtime libraries.

The ASUS Tinker Board offers performance that outclasses other single-board computers in this price range. It can easily be used as a daily PC substitute and it can easily handle some tasks that competitors (like the Pi 3 for example) find difficult. Things like image editing, streaming Full HD videos, and even playing some simple browser-based games can easily be done on the Tinker Board.

This single-board computer copies the form-factor of the raspberry pi to a T. The size is about the same and most of the connectors are at the same spots as the Raspberry Pi.

You can get the official Linux image for the Tinker Board website. It's actually a customized version of Debian that's changed to work as smoothly as possible on Tinker Board's hardware.

It comes with all the essential applications every PC has nowadays (web browser, text, editor, etc.) and some more specialized tools that are used to control the GPIO pins and that allow more advanced users to "talk" to the hardware.

This board has built-in WiFi and Bluetooth capabilities.

Yes, you can add an external WiFi adapter to most SBCs but the ability to connect an external antenna to the embedded WiFi is a pretty rare feature.

Unlike most boards on the market, the ASUS Tinker Board is rather aesthetically pleasing as well. It has an array of colours which help distinguish the different connectors. Especially nice are the GPIO pin headers which are all colour-coded to identify the various types of pins.

And since it has a dedicated controller which is not shared with USB it's very fast an the speed doesn't depend on USB usage (and vice versa).

The Tinker Board uses the same GPIO libraries as Raspberry Pi does. This means that users coming from Raspberry Pi who want to play around with the Tinker Board's GPIO pins will find it very easy to do so.