The Parallella Board vs ASUS Tinker Board S

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 S is a more powerful single-board computer than a Raspberry Pi Model B since it has a more powerful microprocessor as well as larger and faster RAM memory.

The ASUS Tinker Board S doesn't have problems related to overheating because it comes with a massive heatsink that can dissipate all heat generated by the board's powerful microprocessor.

All you need to do to set this board up and running is to upload the appropriate Android or Linux image. Both images can be obtained from the ASUS's official web resource in the form of downloadable .zip files. Simply download the files and drivers on your computer and use the Etcher to flash the Tinker Board S. Overall, the process takes around 10 minutes to complete.

You'll have no problem connecting to a WiFi network or Bluetooth peripherals with the Tinker Board S since it comes with an onboard 802.11 b/g/n - compliant WiFi and Bluetooth transceiver.

Unlike the previous version of the ASUS's Tinker Board, the model S comes equipped with a 16GB eMMC storage which means that you'll always have some space to store the computer's OS as well as some extra applications.

The eMMC memory performs on par with the more commonly known SD memory used on the majority of other single board computers out there since both of those are based on NAND.

You'll not have to tinker around finding the case for this single-board computer since it has the same form factor as the Raspberry Pi 3. You can find a variety of cases that start at around $6.50 here.

Right now, Tinker Board S can run both Android and Linux. Linux comes in the form of TinkerOS_Debian that is based on a well-known Debian distribution while the TinkerOS_Android is based on the Android 6.

This single board-computer has enough juice to stream the 4K media at the frame rate of 30Hz through its HDMI port.

You're less likely to fry this SBC than some of the other ones because the Tinker Board S has the low-voltage detection circuitry which will shut down the computer if it detects inappropriately low voltage coming from the power supply. Usually, cheaper power adapters are the ones that fail to reach the needed 5V mark.

Clear and colorful design.