Qualcomm announces Snapdragon 450 14nm Mobile Platform for budget devices

Chip maker Qualcomm at MWC, Shanghai, 2017 has announced a new chip in its Snapdragon 400 Mobile Platform tier. Dubbed Snapdragon 450, it is aimed at mid-range smartphones and tablets, and is the first in the tier to use 14nm FinFET process. 

The chip boasts significant improvements in battery life, graphics and compute performance, imaging and LTE connectivity over its predecessor, the Snapdragon 435 Mobile Platform. To refesh, Snapdragon 435 is used in the popular Redmi 4 smartphone.

The Snapdragon 450 Mobile Platform focuses on improvements compared to its predecessor in four key categories of features: 

Improved CPU and GPU: Higher performing octa-core ARM Cortex A53 CPU (with a maximum clock speed of 1.8GHz) results in 25 percent increase in performance, and the integrated Qualcomm Adreno 506 GPU delivers a 25 percent increase in graphics performance over its predecessor.

Battery life: Power management improvements result in up to four additional hours of usage time compared to the Snapdragon 435, as well as up to a 30 percent reduction in power when gaming. It also supports Qualcomm Quick Charge 3.0 fast charging technology, which can charge a typical smartphone from zero to 80 percent in about 35 minutes.

Camera and multimedia: The Snapdragon 450 is the first in the 400-tier to support real-time Bokeh (Live Bokeh) effects. It is also designed to improve on previous generations by including support for enhanced dual camera at 13+13MP, or single camera support up to 21MP; hybrid autofocus; and 1080p video capture and playback at up to 60fps, enabling slow motion capture. 

It  also includes support for up to Full HD displays (1920x1200), as well as the Qualcomm Hexagon DSP, which enables multimedia, camera and sensor processing at greater performance and lower power than the previous generation.

Connectivity and USB: It uses Snapdragon X9 LTE modem, which utilizes 2 x 20MHz carrier aggregation in both downlink and uplink for peak speeds of 300 Mbps and 150 Mbps respectively providing support for a large number of mobile networks with Snapdragon All Mode. It also supports 802.11ac with MU-MIMO and USB 3.0 which is first in the Snapdragon 400 tier to support fast USB data transfer.

The Snapdragon 450 is expected to begin commercial sampling to customers in Q3 2017, and is expected to be available in consumer devices by the end of 2017.

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