(Telecompaper) Qualcomm has taken advantage of its appearance at MWC Shanghai to announce the Snapdragon 450, the successor to the 435 and the first in its tier to use 14nm FinFET manufacturing process. Catering to mid-range smartphones and tablets, the Snapdragon 450 is designed to deliver significant improvements in battery life, graphics and compute performance, imaging and LTE connectivity. The improved 14nm process has enabled Qualcomm to increase the maximum clock speed of the octa-core SCO from 1.4GHz to 1.8GHz, while the GPU offers 25 percent better performance than its predecessor, said the company.