It gained’t come as an enormous shock, however the Lenovo Legion Go 2 is confirmed as being in growth, though the identify is topic to alter. Lenovo’s gaming class supervisor for the APAC area, Clifford Chong, has mentioned the probability of the next-generation handheld, however tempered expectations on the subject of a timeline.
The Lenovo Legion Go is without doubt one of the greatest handheld gaming PCs that cash can purchase, largely all the way down to its enormous 8.8-inch, 1600p show. It typically catches comparisons to the Nintendo Swap, due to its detachable controllers, however it has way more highly effective gaming {hardware} beneath the hood than the Swap, together with an AMD Ryzen Z1 Excessive CPU. With a followup model confirmed, right here’s all the things we’ve heard concerning the handheld thus far.
Lenovo Legion 2 exists, form of
Throughout a Lenovo Legion Go roundtable interview again in April 2024, Clifford Chong not solely spoke concerning the Go’s first months available on the market but in addition about what’s coming subsequent for Lenovo within the handheld area.
“We’re nonetheless spending quite a lot of assets enhancing on the present Legion Go over the span of the final six months since launch,” mentioned Chong. “We now have unlocked from day one until now much more experiences and there are nonetheless engineering efforts to attempt to deliver the subsequent wave of options to the product. Undoubtedly, it’s a product class that we do see potential in and we proceed to speculate and we’re wanting in the direction of when the time comes proper, in fact having the subsequent technology present much more options.”
It’s a bloated and loaded quote, that’s simple, however Chong offers flowers to the work nonetheless being achieved on the Legion Go whereas acknowledging that the subsequent technology will exist as a result of Lenovo sees handheld gaming PCs as an necessary market. What’s at present unclear is whether or not the hand-held might be known as the Legion Go 2. There have additionally been rumors of a Legion Go Lite that ditches detachable controllers of the unique design. It might be a disgrace if subsequent Legion Go units dropped this distinctive design.
Lenovo Legion 2 specs rumors
There’s nonetheless little or no to go on when it comes to rumors concerning the exterior specs of a attainable Legion Go 2. Whether or not its design, display screen, and controller configuration change is all very a lot up within the air. Nevertheless, The only greatest expectation surrounding the machine is that it’d characteristic a brand new AMD Ryzen Z2 Excessive CPU.
The present Legion Go makes use of the AMD Ryzen Z1 Excessive, which is a chip that homes an eight-core CPU (can cope with 16 threads) with a 12 compute unit GPU (for a complete of 768 stream processors). In the meantime, the brand new Z2 Excessive that’s anticipated to be unveiled by AMD on the CES commerce present in January 2025 can be an eight-core/16-thread chip however with a beefed up GPU, based on leaks. Its GPU not solely is predicted to make use of the latest RDNA 3.5 structure – up from the RDNA 3 in Z1 Excessive – however have 16 compute models as a substitute of 12.
| Lenovo Legion Go 2 | |
| APU/CPU | AMD Ryzen Z2 Excessive |
| Whole CPU cores | 8 |
| Zen 5 cores | 3 |
| Zen 5c cores | 5 |
| L3 cache | 16MB |
| GPU structure | AMD RDNA 3.5 |
| GPU stream processors | 1,024 |
| GPU compute models | 16 |
Consequently, the Z2 Excessive and the Legion Go 2 with it ought to have a noticeably extra succesful GPU that may run video games at a quicker body fee or with increased particulars settings for a similar efficiency.
It’s additionally attainable the brand new chip will use a extra superior manufacturing course of, enabling it to ship this further efficiency with out drawing extra energy – and attainable whereas drawing much less – than the Z1 Excessive. Nevertheless, we’ve no sturdy rumors to again up this conjecture thus far.
Lenovo Legion 2 launch date hypothesis
Again when the Legion Go 2 was first rumored, it was anticipated that the primary second-gen gaming handheld to launch can be a Steam Deck 2. Nevertheless, with the arrival of the Steam Deck OLED, it’s now anticipated {that a} Steam Deck 2 gained’t arrive for a while but.
As an alternative, the Legion Go 2 might be among the many first true second-gen handhelds to reach. Whereas we’ve had the Asus ROG Ally X deliver a refreshed bodily design to the Asus ROG Ally, it nonetheless makes use of the Z1 Excessive processor so has almost equivalent efficiency. A refreshed Legion Go along with a Z2 Excessive arriving early subsequent 12 months may actually shake up the market. That mentioned, Asus has a powerful monitor document of securing huge firsts for brand spanking new tech, so it’s attainable a real ROG Ally 2 will arrive first.
Both method, whereas there have been no significant Legion Go 2 launch date leaks, we’d count on the reasonable launch interval to be a way into 2025. We may see the machine teased at CES however it’s prone to take a number of extra months to reach. The unique Legion Go launch date was October 2023, so an arrival of the Legion Go 2 in October 2025 can be a smart two 12 months improve timeframe.
Should you’re but to be transformed to handheld gaming for worry that it’s restricted, we are able to present you find out how to play Xbox video games on Steam Deck, and in addition run you thru how Steam Deck Proton works to make numerous video games appropriate with Valve’s handheld.
