AMD Ryzen chief teases return of older Zen 3 chips to fight soaring RAM prices — 'That's something we're actively working on right now'

The proverbial news cannon that is CES is firing new products on all barrels, but every now and then, there's a stray remark that makes our ears perk up. In a round-table interview Tom's Hardware attended at CES 2026 in Las Vegas, AMD's David McAfee was discussing the sorry state of the ongoing chip crisis, and he let out a hint that AMD could bring back older AM4 desktop chips, presumably 5000-series Ryzen processors and APUs based on the Zen 3 architecture.

As even non-techies know by now, buying a brand new computer is a prohibitively expensive proposition, thanks mainly to the absurd prices of DDR5 memory. In addition, folks moving from machines that are just four years old will find themselves in the unenviable position of having to buy overpriced memory and a new motherboard on top of that, as the move to DDR5 also implies a socket change for both Intel and AMD chips.

When questioned about the rock-and-hard-place situation these users are in, McAfee stated that AMD "[is] certainly looking at everything that [it] can do to bring more supply and kind of reintroduce products back into the [AM4] ecosystem to satisfy the demands of gamers that maybe want that significant upgrade in their AM4 platform without having to rebuild their entire system", further adding that he thinks this is "definitely something [AMD is] very actively working on."

It should be noted that a remark by one person does not make for a company-wide mission statement, but at least at face value, this move would make full sense for both AMD and customers. Furthermore, the context for the aforementioned statement was that AMD's telemetry obtained through the Adrenalin software corroborated that a significant portion of users are still running 2000- and 3000-series chips.

In addition to that, McAfee noted that many of its retail partners are seeing higher numbers of CPU-only purchases, indicating that shoppers are buying new-old chips to grant a tangible speed boost to their existing machines in these troubled times, where just buying 32 GB of DDR5 memory, a new CPU, and a motherboard will easily bite you for over a grand.

While the scenario described is of someone upgrading just their CPU, older machines will likely have 8 to 16 GB of memory, thus asking for another DIMM or two. DDR4 prices have also been steadily rising, though Samsung has reversed its decision to stop DDR4 production, while SK hynix has reportedly increased DDR4 production at its Wuxi facility. Looks like, for the time being, keeping existing machines going is the only option many enthusiasts will have.

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