Qualcomm announces 14nm based Snapdragon 450 with highest power-efficiency for mid-range smartphones

Qualcomm has announced the most significant upgrade to its 400-series with the highly power-efficient 14nm process based Snapdragon 450 chipset. The new Qualcomm chipset is reportedly optimised for midrange smartphones to offer more efficiency than the current-gen 400-series chips which implement a 28nm process.

The Snapdragon 450 chipset will run on the same Cortex A53 processor cores, which have been the hallmark of success for the current-gen 400-series' most-powerful chipset, the Snapdragon 435. The current-gen Snapdragon 435 chipset is clocked at 1.4GHz while the next-gen Snapdragon 450 chipset will be clocked at 1.8GHz.

Android Police reports that the Qualcomm 450 will include a new Hexagon 546 DSP which will be up to five times more efficient than the DSP used in previous-gen 400-series chips. The reason for this enhanced efficiency on 450 chipset has been attributed to higher-end components from 600 and 800 series trickling down to the 400-series.

Some of the noteworthy benefits of Snapdragon 450 for smartphone users include: up to four hours longer battery life, support for dual camera setup with real-time Bokeh effect, up to 25 percent higher CPU and GPU performance than the current-gen Snapdragon 400 chipsets, support for 60fps video recording and playback, USB 3.0 and Qualcomm's Quick Charge 3.0 technology.

Qualcomm's X9 LTE modem will be another key feature being brought forward from last year's Snapdragon 435 chipset architecture to next-gen Snapdragon 450 for the budget phones.

Gaming enthusiasts can now avail the benefits of advanced graphics support like Vulkan and DirectX 12 with Adreno 506 GPU which has been inherited from the Snapdragon 625 chip. Being based on the 14nm process, the Snapdragon 450 incorporates twice the number of processing clusters to deliver extreme performance with greater power efficiency on the same GPU.

Qualcomm has tipped off that the Snapdragon 450 will see its debut release sometime in Q4 2017. So, that's some big news for gaming enthusiasts as well as power-hungry smartphone users.