AMD is proud of their Turion 64 chip for mobile computers, and presumably it is a very nice piece of work. This is, of course, exciting to botanists everywhere, because turion is a botanical term of long standing, although rather obscure even among botanical terms. It is good to know that a powerhouse like AMD is promulgating botanical terminology.
A turion is a resistant plant bud that is found in certain aquatic plants, and can allow the plant to survive winter in the vegetative state (i.e., without setting seeds). The word "turio" is latin for a shoot or sprout (shoot in the sense of a plant stem and leaves), and is used in this case because a bud can develop into a shoot, as might happen with the turion in the spring after the ice has melted. An example of a plant that makes turions is Utricularia, a very nifty aquatic angiosperm that is also a carnivore. In addition to turions, Utricularia produces tiny traps called utricles that use a hair-trigger suction mechanism to trap unsuspecting water fleas that might wander by. The name of the plant is a reference to its utricles. If you mouse over the image below the turions and utricles are labeled.
It is fun to speculate how marketing came up with this name. My first thought was that someone had just fliped through a dictionary until they came up with something that sounded impressive. After all, that Latinate ending "-on" does sound impressive. There are 308 million six-letter combinations, so randomly coining an existing word might seem unlikely, but to be fair, not all combinations of letters would be pronouncible, and even fewer would sound good. We can hardly blame them for not choosing "Spflut" as their product name. Lately I have begun to suspect it may be a reference to Alan Turing, one of the founders of modern computer science. But it is nice to think that they just wanted to be sure that everyone knew about Utricularia and how it survives winter. Maybe their next chip will be the Utricle 2011.