AMD might start making Zen 3 processors again for AM4, as customers shy away from expensive DDR5 upgrade
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CES might be an excellent platform for announcing new technology, but this year it’s seemingly moved away from consumers and toward corporations and businesses. As AMD’s keynote focused more on servers and AI than consumer hardware, even with the brief showcase of the new 9850X3D.
However, interestingly, AMD might be bringing back some AM4 hardware due to the state of the market, according to David McAfee, as reported by Tom’s Hardware at a roundtable during the annual conference. The VP & GM of Ryzen CPU and Radeon graphics revealed 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,” adding that this is something AMD is “very actively working on”.
If AMD were to revisit older models, it seems likely that Ryzen 5000 CPUs would be the focus, in an attempt to lower the cost of building a new PC. Considering the pricing of DDR5 RAM continues to rise, switching to/sticking with DDR4 instead, even if it is slower and on a dead-end platform, is much more affordable in terms of price per GB.
AM4 CPUs and DDR4 memory climb the top sellers
The processors should be a lot cheaper, too, now that they’ve been end-of-life for so long. That’s if supplies last, but they seemingly are for now, as seen in the various market top sellers like Amazon. So it’s no real surprise that AMD is considering starting production up again to keep the market stocked.
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Amazon best selling CPUs, Jan 8th 2026
Amazon best selling memory, Jan 8th 2026
Just looking at Amazon’s own best-selling lists, you can see the old tech already there. The Ryzen 5 5500 is number 3, 5800XT at number 7, and 3600 at number 8. Similarly, in memory, number two is 32GB of DDR4 3200MHz Corsair, number 3 is G.SKILL’s 16GB 3200MT/s, before finally DDR5 comes in at number 4 with the Crucial Pro 32GB kit of 6,400MHz CL32 memory.
That 32GB DDR5 kit comes in at $321.99 compared to the DDR4 kit, which costs $178.99 for the same capacity. So it’s no real wonder people are turning to the older hardware to get better value for money.
Particularly since a lot of these are going to be upgrades for many users. According to David, AMD’s Adrenalin telemetry has noted a significant portion of users are still on 2000 and 3000 series processors. So just upgrading to the 5000 series and some more capacity and faster DDR4 RAM is a lot cheaper than a more budget AM5 system.
In other news, we’ve also seen speculation that Nvidia is starting production of RTX 30 series graphics cards again – the massively popular RTX 3060 in particular, also in the wake of rising memory costs for the latest GPU models.
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