It received’t come as an enormous shock, however the Lenovo Legion Go 2 is confirmed as being in improvement, though the identify is topic to vary. Lenovo’s gaming class supervisor for the APAC area, Clifford Chong, has mentioned the probability of the next-generation handheld, however tempered expectations relating to a timeline.

The Lenovo Legion Go is among the finest handheld gaming PCs that cash should buy, largely all the way down to its big 8.8-inch, 1600p show. It usually catches comparisons to the Nintendo Change, because of its detachable controllers, nevertheless it has way more highly effective gaming {hardware} beneath the hood than the Change, together with an AMD Ryzen Z1 Excessive CPU. With a followup model confirmed, right here’s every part we’ve heard in regards to the handheld to date.

Lenovo Legion 2 exists, sort of

Throughout a Lenovo Legion Go roundtable interview again in April 2024, Clifford Chong not solely spoke in regards to 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 sources bettering on the present Legion Go over the span of the final six months since launch,” mentioned Chong. “Now we have unlocked from day one until now much more experiences and there are nonetheless engineering efforts to try 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 era present much more options.”

It’s a bloated and loaded quote, that’s simple, however Chong provides flowers to the work nonetheless being finished on the Legion Go whereas acknowledging that the subsequent era will exist as a result of Lenovo sees handheld gaming PCs as an vital market. What’s at the moment unclear is whether or not the hand-held will likely 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 gadgets dropped this distinctive design.

Lenovo Legion 2 specs rumors

There’s nonetheless little or no to go on when it comes to rumors in regards to the exterior specs of a doable Legion Go 2. Whether or not its design, display screen, and controller configuration change is all very a lot up within the air. Nonetheless, The one greatest expectation surrounding the machine is that it would function 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 take care of 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 also be an eight-core/16-thread chip however with a beefed up GPU, based on leaks. Its GPU not solely is anticipated 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.

Because of this, 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 price or with greater particulars settings for a similar efficiency.

It’s additionally doable 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 doable whereas drawing much less – than the Z1 Excessive. Nonetheless, we’ve no sturdy rumors to again up this conjecture to date.

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. Nonetheless, with the arrival of the Steam Deck OLED, it’s now anticipated {that a} Steam Deck 2 received’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 practically equivalent efficiency. A refreshed Legion Go together with a Z2 Excessive arriving early subsequent yr might actually shake up the market. That mentioned, Asus has a powerful observe document of securing massive firsts for brand new tech, so it’s doable a real ROG Ally 2 will arrive first.

Both manner, whereas there have been no significant Legion Go 2 launch date leaks, we’d anticipate the reasonable launch interval to be a way into 2025. We might see the machine teased at CES nevertheless 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 yr improve timeframe.

If you happen to’re but to be transformed to handheld gaming for concern that it’s restricted, we are able to present you play Xbox video games on Steam Deck, and likewise run you thru how Steam Deck Proton works to make numerous video games appropriate with Valve’s handheld.