Intro - Brian McKenzie

Introductions/Bios
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Name: Brian McKenzie
Title/Job Description: Software Engineer
Company: VES LLC at Aberdeen Proving Ground
Location/Country: United States
First AArch64 device: 96Boards LeMaker Hikey 2GB
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/brian-mckenzie
Favorite Book/Movie/Song/TV Show: The Harry Potter series, Star Wars, too many to list haha, Mythbusters

I’ve been working with embedded Linux for the last 14 years and I’ve always had an interest in pushing the boundaries of what mobile technology can do. Back in 2009 I created the Ubuntu 9.04 port for the Nokia N800 and N810 internet tablet and also participated in the Darwin on ARM project.

I’ve always had a fascination with the ARM architecture and it’s been exciting to see it evolve from something that was only expected to power something in your pocket to something that can power a data center. I’ve got a Marvell MACCHIATObin, an M1 MacBook Pro, and soon an Ampere Altra Dev Kit Q80 that I am planning to turn into a custom workstation.

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Hello Brian, and welcome to this community :wave:

I love your boundaries-pushing projects! :heart:

I have nothing that ambitious on my plate, but I kind of like asking hardware to do things it was not designed for. :thinking:

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That’s really cool! It’d be kinda fun to see how a Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 phone could perform as a builder with its ARMv9 cores. It’d certainly be a fun way to up-cycle it, though I’m sure a few modifications would need to be made to manage heat dissipation with the sustained process load haha.

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