It won’t come as a huge surprise, but the Lenovo Legion Go 2 is confirmed as being in development, although the name is subject to change. Lenovo’s gaming category manager for the APAC region, Clifford Chong, has discussed the likelihood of the next-generation handheld, but tempered expectations when it comes to a timeline.
The Lenovo Legion Go is one of the best handheld gaming PCs that money can buy, largely down to its huge 8.8-inch, 1600p display. It often catches comparisons to the Nintendo Switch, thanks to its removable controllers, but it has much more powerful gaming hardware under the hood than the Switch, including an AMD Ryzen Z1 Extreme CPU. With a followup version confirmed, here’s everything we’ve heard about the handheld so far.
Lenovo Legion 2 exists, kind of
During a Lenovo Legion Go roundtable interview back in April 2024, Clifford Chong not only spoke about the Go’s first months on the market but also about what’s coming next for Lenovo in the handheld space.
“We are still spending a lot of resources improving on the current Legion Go over the span of the last six months since launch,” said Chong. “We have unlocked from day one till now a lot more experiences and there are still engineering efforts to try and bring the next wave of features to the product. Definitely, it’s a product category that we do see potential in and we continue to invest and we are looking towards when the time comes right, of course having the next generation provide even more features.”
It’s a bloated and loaded quote, that’s undeniable, but Chong gives flowers to the work still being done on the Legion Go while acknowledging that the next generation will exist because Lenovo sees handheld gaming PCs as an important market. What’s currently unclear is whether the handheld will be called the Legion Go 2. There have also been rumors of a Legion Go Lite that ditches removable controllers of the original design. It would be a shame if subsequent Legion Go devices dropped this unique design.
Lenovo Legion 2 specs rumors
There’s still very little to go on in terms of rumors about the external specs of a possible Legion Go 2. Whether its design, screen, and controller configuration change is all very much up in the air. However, The single biggest expectation surrounding the device is that it might feature a new AMD Ryzen Z2 Extreme CPU.
The current Legion Go uses the AMD Ryzen Z1 Extreme, which is a chip that houses an eight-core CPU (can deal with 16 threads) with a 12 compute unit GPU (for a total of 768 stream processors). Meanwhile, the new Z2 Extreme that’s expected to be unveiled by AMD at the CES trade show in January 2025 is also an eight-core/16-thread chip but with a beefed up GPU, according to leaks. Its GPU not only is expected to use the most recent RDNA 3.5 architecture – up from the RDNA 3 in Z1 Extreme – but have 16 compute units instead of 12.
| Lenovo Legion Go 2 | |
| APU/CPU | AMD Ryzen Z2 Extreme |
| Total CPU cores | 8 |
| Zen 5 cores | 3 |
| Zen 5c cores | 5 |
| L3 cache | 16MB |
| GPU architecture | AMD RDNA 3.5 |
| GPU stream processors | 1,024 |
| GPU compute units | 16 |
As a result, the Z2 Extreme and the Legion Go 2 with it should have a noticeably more capable GPU that can run games at a faster frame rate or with higher details settings for the same performance.
It’s also possible the new chip will use a more advanced manufacturing process, enabling it to deliver this extra performance without drawing more power – and possible while drawing less – than the Z1 Extreme. However, we’ve no strong rumors to back up this conjecture so far.
Lenovo Legion 2 release date speculation
Back when the Legion Go 2 was first rumored, it was expected that the first second-gen gaming handheld to launch would be a Steam Deck 2. However, with the arrival of the Steam Deck OLED, it is now expected that a Steam Deck 2 won’t arrive for some time yet.
Instead, the Legion Go 2 could be among the first true second-gen handhelds to arrive. While we’ve had the Asus ROG Ally X bring a refreshed physical design to the Asus ROG Ally, it still uses the Z1 Extreme processor so has nearly identical performance. A refreshed Legion Go with a Z2 Extreme arriving early next year could really shake up the market. That said, Asus has a strong track record of securing big firsts for new tech, so it’s possible a true ROG Ally 2 will arrive first.
Either way, while there have been no meaningful Legion Go 2 release date leaks, we would expect the realistic release period to be some way into 2025. We could see the device teased at CES but it’s likely to take several more months to arrive. The original Legion Go release date was October 2023, so an arrival of the Legion Go 2 in October 2025 would be a sensible two year upgrade timeframe.
If you’re yet to be converted to handheld gaming for fear that it’s limited, we can show you how to play Xbox games on Steam Deck, and also run you through how Steam Deck Proton works to make countless games compatible with Valve’s handheld.