Mid-range smartphones to get lot more capable with Snapdragon 450

Qualcomm has freshly unveiled the Snapdragon 450 SoC earlier today at MWC Shanghai. The new chipset brings forth some attractive new upgrades compared to the Snapdragon 435. The fact that the chipset now comes with up to 4 hours more battery life is probably the highlight here.

Most notably, the Snapdragon 450 is made using the 14nm manufacturing process, while the SD435 was produced using 28nm. This opens up all new avenues for the Snapdragon 400 series, as it has been for long considered to be a budget ranged chipset lineup.

Qualcomm is still using Cortex-A53 cores here, but thanks to the new manufacturing process, the clock speed has been bumped from 1.4 GHz to 1.8 GHz, thus allowing for significantly improved performance. The SoC now comes with the slightly upgraded Adreno 506 GPU in favor of the Adreno 505. Qualcomm claims that the new GPU offers 25% better performance compared to the predecessor.

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Strangely enough, the chip is eerily similar to the Snapdragon 625 SoC which was launched last year with the same GPU and the manufacturing process. It is said that the SD450 is pin compatible with the SD625 as well, which basically means that manufacturers can use this particular chipset on their devices right away.

Thanks to the new upgrades, the chipset will now be capable of supporting dual 13MP cameras on board while the predecessor could only use 8MP sensors. This is quite a crucial addition considering how the market is slowly transitioning towards dual-camera smartphones. There’s also support for bokeh effect, and other software features to enhance mobile photography. The new SD450 is also capable of handling a single 21MP camera sensor.

The SD450 comes with the onboard X9 modem with support for LTE Category 7 down and Category 13 up, allowing maximum speeds of 300Mbps down and 150 Mbps up. Qualcomm has also bumped up the USB controller from USB 2.0 to USB 3.0 here, which is great news.