Month: April 2023

Enlarge / With a starting price of $26,500, it's no surprise that Chevrolet has sold a lot of Bolt EVs this year. (credit: General Motors)

As we're now in the second quarter of the year, automakers have been reporting their sales numbers. Tesla, which we covered on Monday, is far and away the leader when it comes to electric vehicle sales in the US. But as more and more automakers are bringing new EVs to market, Tesla's market share is eroding, from 72 percent at the beginning of last year to 54 percent now—and it may fall to less than 50 percent over the next few weeks. Which of those other automakers are managing to move metal? We took a look through the Q1 sales announcements to get an idea.

While most automakers have published their Q1 2023 sales, this is not a universal list. In particular, Porsche, Mercedes-Benz, Lucid, and Genesis have yet to reveal those numbers as of April 5. And the manufacturers don't all break out data in the same way, either lumping all EVs together (looking at you, General Motors) or grouping different powertrains together (as is the case with the Kia Niro and Hyundai Kona).

It's also helpful to remember that, other than Tesla, Rivian, and Lucid, all the other automakers have product lines other than battery EVs, so such a company probably isn't going out of business next week because it only sold 3,000 EVs in three months. Supply chains still aren't back to what was considered normal pre-pandemic, and it's worth remembering that in most cases, these are global products. There are severe penalties for automakers who don't sell enough EVs in Europe and China, unlike here in the US. So in cases of finite supply, those markets will receive priority when it comes to deliveries—every EV you sell in the US is an EV you can't sell in Germany, after all.

Enlarge (credit: Bruno Vincent / Getty Images)

The UK’s communications watchdog has called for a probe into Microsoft and Amazon’s dominance of the country’s cloud computing market in the latest challenge to the tech giants from global regulators.

Ofcom said on Wednesday it was “particularly concerned” by the practices of Amazon Web Services and Microsoft, which together control between 60 and 70 per cent of the UK cloud market. It has proposed referring the sector to the Competition and Markets Authority for further investigation.

Cloud computing is dominated by Amazon and Microsoft, and has become a crucial driver of revenue at the tech giants.

Enlarge / The AMD Ryzen 7 7800X3D. (credit: Andrew Cunningham)

If you were intrigued by AMD's Ryzen 9 7950X3D but didn't want to spend $700 on a processor, the $450 Ryzen 7 7800X3D might be the chip you've been waiting for.

Like the more-expensive X3D chips, the 7800X3D is a regular Zen 4 processor with an extra 64MB of L3 cache stacked on top of it. That extra cache isn't always useful, but it does tend to boost game performance, and AMD has marketed the X3D series mostly to PC gamers looking for a processor to pair with high-end GPUs like the GeForce RTX 4090 and Radeon RX 7900 XTX.

The X3D chips all come with compromises, mainly in the form of lower clock speeds and less-flexible overclocking support. But if you mainly care about games, the good news is that the 7800X3D runs them just as well as the more-expensive 7950X3D for less money, and it does so without generating too much heat or using too much power.