Month: March 2020

Enlarge (credit: HBO)

This review contains mild spoilers about the series' basic premise but leaves most major plot beats of both the TV series and the original book unspoiled. We have seen all six episodes of the limited-run TV series, whose first episode debuts on HBO on March 16, but only mention the first two episodes.

With fantasy and sci-fi skyrocketing as some of the most popular television genres, we're seeing the rise of that realm's subgenres—most notably the alternate-history subset, which was once shelved alongside stories of dragons and elves. The latest, The Plot Against America, is HBO's most recent crack at the category. But from what we've seen of the first season in preview form (its first episode premieres Monday, March 16), the series trips over itself to make a point about today's political landscape and, in the process, undermines its message.

The late author Philip Roth took inspiration for his 2004 alternate-history novel from the real-life figure of Charles Lindbergh, the 1920s-era aviator who became a superstar celebrity decades before there was a term for it. Lindbergh, who lived abroad in the 1930s, was an open supporter of non-intervention and Nazi Germany, and his return to America in 1939 prompted stories in the press that he might run for president. His Iowa speech of 1941, in which he blamed the "three most important groups" of "the British, the Jews, and the Roosevelt administration" for World War II, illustrated his anti-Semitic views. His influence at the time was so substantial, President Roosevelt felt it necessary to publicly rebuke him for it.

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  Despite AMD's currently abysmal laptop marketshare, the company claims a lot of historical firsts over the past 10 years. [credit: AMD ]

AMD has scored big 7nm performance wins over the last few months with its Ryzen 3000-series desktop CPUs, Threadripper 3000-series HEDT CPUs, and Epyc Rome server CPUs—and the newest addition to the family, the Ryzen Mobile 4000 series, looks like it will continue in the same vein.

No one should be surprised that the Ryzen Mobile 4000—which brings AMD's Zen 2 7nm architecture to the laptop world—outperforms Intel's laptop CPU offerings on multi-threaded performance or graphics performance. Even single-threaded performance—which has finally achieved par—isn't the big stumbling block we've been waiting to see if AMD could conquer.

The egregious black mark against AMD's mobile line over the last year or two hasn't been about performance at all—at first glance, it's about battery life. At a second, closer look, it's even more about OEM integration. We're pleased to see that AMD has taken giant strides to improve both issues with this year's mobile CPU lineup.