By Zhaan 
As if being a PC gamer wasn’t bad enough already, AMD Ryzen honcho David McAfee has come out and teased a possible return of older desktop chips to combat rising prices in the PC hardware market. This report comes from Tom’s Hardware, who was present at a CES 2026 round-table interview.
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.
Nvidia, who is much to blame for the current situation to begin with, is also rumoured to bring back outdated hardware soon. Specifically, their 2021 mid-range GPU – the RTX 3060. I’d laugh, but it’s just sad at this point.
For those of you who aren’t up to date on this topic, the ongoing AI craze in the world has led to skyrocketing prices on memory chips (RAM), and it would seem that GPUs and CPUs will suffer the same fate. This is of course going to impact the entire tech industry in general, and unless a miracle happens, you can expect higher price tags on everything from phones to video game consoles.
Personally, I was looking forward to building a PC this year as I didn’t have the funds to do so in 2025. Naturally, I feel pretty bad about that now, but it is what it is. We can only hope this AI madness will end soon.