Qualcomm Snapdragon 450 vs Qualcomm Snapdragon 439

Qualcomm Snapdragon 450

The Qualcomm Snapdragon 450 (SD450) is a lower mainstream SoC for (Android based) smartphones and tablets. It features eight ARM Cortex-A53 cores at up to 1.8 GHz and is already manufactured in the power efficient 14nm process. The integrated X9 LTE modem supports Cat. 7 with maximum transfer rates of 300 Mbps (downstream) and 150 Mbps (upstream). The SoC also includes an Adreno 506 GPU with support for Vulkan and OpenGL ES 3.1. WiFi 802.11ac (1x1, max 364 Mbps) and Bluetooth 4.1 are supported as well. The memory controller supports LPDDR3 (single channel) and the integrated video engine supports H.264 (encode and decode) and HEVC (only decode) in 1080p.

Qualcomm Snapdragon 439

The Qualcomm Snapdragon 439 (SD439) is a lower mainstream SoC for (Android based) smartphones and tablets. Compared to the older Snapdragon 435, the 439 is now manufactured in the current 12nm FinFET process and offers higher clock speeds of 2 GHz of the eight ARM Cortex-A53 cores (compared to 1.4 GHz). Wifi (now ac Wave 2 / Wifi 5) and Bluetooth (v5) were also updated, however the GPU still is the rather slow Adreno 505 and the LTE modem was even downgraded to a X6 with only Cat. 4/5 (max. 150 Mbps download, 75 Mbps upload).

Thanks to the higher maximum clock speed, the performance of the Snapdragon 439 mobile platform can reach the old Snapdragon 625 (also 2 GHz with 8x Cortex-A53). However, there is still a big gap to the SoCs with bigger performance cores.