The advantage of AMD’s Llano is that while its processor ends up being a little less powerful, it makes up for it by having much stronger graphics, which is more important when playing games or working with video. While Intel has powerful processors, it has weak integrated graphics, and Apple was likely trying to improve on this by switching to AMD. However, this deal fell through when AMD wasn’t able to guarantee enough supply of their Llano processors to Apple.

This speedy chip almost makes me want Apple to switch to AMD. Today, the FireStream 9250 stream processor was announced with more than one teraflop of processing power. A teraflop! The chip fits in a single PCI slot, and only uses less than 150 watts of power. This speedy friend can deliver a rate of performance per watt, with up to eight gigaflops per watt. The Firestream 9250 is capable of a hundred parallel calculations per clock cycle, where most proccessers can only do a few. NetworkWorld points out that, “A gigaflop is 1 billion floating-point operations per second.” So, the 9250 tops 1 teraflop, or 1 trillion floating-point operations per second.

More after the break.