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.

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