Rumors of AMD stopping Ryzen Z1 Extreme gaming handheld support squashed by Lenovo

A week ago, several reports began to emerge, hinting at AMD potentially ending support of the Ryzen Z1 Extreme processor found in PC gaming handhelds like the original Lenovo Legion Go and ASUS ROG Ally X. The main source for this report was Lenovo's Korean community team, which said that there were no more plans to release new drivers for the original Legion Go handheld.

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Throw in the fact that these Ryzen Z1 Extreme handhelds hadn't received an official graphics driver update for months, and you can see why it looked like AMD was pulling back support for the chip even though it's only a couple of years old. As driver packages for very specific devices like the Legion Go come from vendors who work with AMD, and not the generic or standard AMD Software Adrenalin Edition updates that serve as a catch-all for all modern Radeon GPUs, it puts these handhelds in the position of potentially becoming obsolete, or not optimized to run the latest releases.

Well, there's some good news for Ryzen Z1 Extreme gamers and original Lenovo Legion Go owners, as the company has released a statement to PCWorld confirming that it will support its first-generation PC gaming handheld with driver updates through to 2029.

"Support for the Lenovo Legion Go (8.8", 1) has not been discontinued," the statement begins. "Lenovo is actively continuing to support the Legion Go (8.8", 1) with necessary driver and BIOS updates and will continue to do so through October 2029. Lenovo is working in concert with AMD on driver update cadence, and new updates will be released once they have passed Lenovo's rigorous review protocols."

Granted, as the Legion Go is a premium device that we'd love to see support continue through to 2030 and beyond, this is good news as a PC gaming handheld, like a console, should have support for several years, not two.