At CES 2026, AMD and Nvidia both signaled that they’re considering bringing back older chip technologies to battle the sudden shortages and extreme price hikes battering the PC ecosystem right know.
I warned y’all this could happen.
We were chatting about reports of AMD resurrecting older B650 motherboards in a recent episode of our Full Nerd podcast. And, as part of the discussion, I brought up that chip vendors like AMD and Intel are already mixing older silicon into modern lineups in somewhat sneaky ways. (Remember AMD’s laughable decoder ring?) I suggested we could soon witness the return of older nodes to “new” products to help combat soaring PC costs. “Let’s not get crazy,” fellow Nerd Will Smith said after a sigh.
Well, Will, I’m not crazy. It’s the world we’re living in that’s crazy.
In a series of roundtable interviews with AMD and Nvidia executives, Tom’s Hardware pressed that exact line of questioning. And the answers Tom’s received may simultaneously cast fear into the hearts of long-term PC enthusiasts and spark hope for more affordable PCs in the hearts of normies.
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang didn’t sound opposed to the idea when Paul Alcorn posited the question of spinning up older GPUs on dated process nodes.
“Yeah, possibly, and we could possibly, depending on which generation, we could also bring the latest generation AI technology to the previous generation GPUs, and that will require a fair amount of engineering, but it’s also within the realm of possibility. I’ll go back and take a look at this. It’s a good idea.”
It’s not a tacit confirmation that Nvidia would do so, obviously, but it clearly could be on the table. Earlier this month, rumors started swirling about Nvidia potentially reviving the RTX 3060 — a card that launched in 2021 — in this quarter.
AMD’s David McAfee, the VP and GM of Ryzen and Radeon, had obviously thought of the possibility before Tom’s raised it in another roundtable interview.
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.”
McAfee also added that the concept is “definitely something [AMD is] very actively working on.”
AMD’s newer, DDR5-based AM5 motherboards launched alongside the Ryzen 7000 series all the way back in 2022. DDR4-based AM4 motherboards have been around since the first generation Ryzen chips launched in 2017. DDR4 is being phased out and isn’t as cheap as it was a year ago, but still costs far less than DDR5 RAM.
You can buy 16GB of DDR4 for around $150 at the time of writing, while 16GB of DDR5 will set you back around $250, depending on the kit – and prices are only rising (rapidly) for the newer gen.
Is this a good thing or a bad thing? I think it depends on your philosophy. Going backwards is nothing you ever want to see in the technology industry, but with AI datacenters gobbling up all the air (and RAM, and GPUs, and SSDs, and..) in the room currently, PC vendors risk losing mainstream buyers completely if they don’t figure out a way to combat the soaring prices.
Either way, it’s definitely a trend to keep an eye on in 2026, where what’s old could apparently be new again. Hopefully you managed to snag a new PC for cheap during Black Friday, because we warned you about that, too.
Author: Brad Chacos
Source: PCWorld
Reviewed By: Editorial Team
