Smokeball on Snapdragon X Elite

Hi Athar,

I have not heard of anyone using Snapdragon X Elite.  I will keep my ear out and send anyone using to this post.  Have a great weekend!

@atharkhan  I’ll ping @leonzhou and the team responsible for our infrastructure about this one. I’m aware we looked into improving ARM compatibility and that a lot of the Microsoft frameworks we build Smokeball on were also being made more cross compatible by the MSFT team. 

However I just got back from parental leave so I am a few months behind! 

Hi Athar, 
Here’s a quick update from @leonzhou and @antonycukeric on where we’re up to: 
1. Core Smokeball functionality (the desktop app) is on .NET6 now- which is cross compatible with Arm64 at least according to Microsoft . Testing so far hasn’t flagged any issues- we test a lot but there’s always potential unknowns with how much variation there is in the way people set up Smokeball. 
2. We’ll do the next jump to .NET8 shortly. We have to be careful because of the many, many environments our firms run SB on. We need to be as backwards compatible as we are forwards! 
3.The Office add-ins will lag behind, I’m aware that @antonycukeric and his amazing team are deep into the work required for a complete rewrite of the Outlook add-in to support the new version and I believe this will work on essentially anything with an internet connection once it’s live. 

Hope that helps! I’ll keep an eye out for anyone else on ARM and send them this way :) 

Any updates on this? Looking at buying a Surface Laptop with Snapdragon Elite - can I use Smokeball on it?

Hello,

I have a Honor MagicBook Art 14 on the Snapdragon X Elite processor.

I can’t install Smokeball Prosper + on the computer at all and non of the plug-ins seem to work. My experience is somewhat inconsistent with others on the forums (as it seems some ARM processors can install? but not officially support). Mine can’t even get installed - it ends with an error.

I did spend a fair penny getting this laptop on the basis of ARM Architecture, which I’m betting will have a future. 

Does Smokeball have a plan in place or timeline to provide official ARM support - such as the computers using Snapdragon processors?

Thanks in advance. 

​@CJL_Law - I am not aware of any ARM version of Smokeball currently in development.  I am just an external user and have no inside knowledge, but it seems inevitable in the long term.

ARM was originally designed with a reduced instruction set to prioritize battery life, which is why it was mostly used in phones. Intel dominated desktops and laptops because its more complex instruction set was better suited for performance-heavy tasks. That distinction really does not exist anymore as ARM has gone fully mainstream for desktops and laptops. 

To me, this is an “adapt or die” type situation for Smokeball.  But again, this is just one person’s opinion. Hopefully, because Smokeball already develops mobile apps for iOS and Android, expanding to a native ARM desktop version should not be as difficult for them as it once would have been.