Matador and Toreador.
( From the Goog...article since removed)

Toreador - A bull fighter ( Toro Lat, Bull.)
Matador - A Bullfighter who kills the bull ( Mata Sp,To Kill )

There are now two versions of Flash: Matador and Toreador.

Matador: For beginners ,Web designer, interactive media professional, or for the teacher developing multimedia content. Emphasis is on creation, import, and manipulation of many types of media (audio, video, bitmaps, vectors, text, and data).

Toreador: For Experts . Advanced Web designers and application builders. Toreador includes everything Matador has along with several powerful new tools. It provides project management tools for better coordination between designers and developers.

It suppors External scripting, databinding, and can be used well for large scale, complex projects that will be deployed using Flash Player along with a hybrid of HTML content.

New features available in both Matador and Toreador (PARTIAL LIST):

Document launch, doc tabs (Windows), Find and Replace, Undo/Redo, History panel, Commands menu, Dynamic toolbar configuration, extensible tools, Spell checker, Import Power Point and Authorware Behaviors and Effects, Video importing, encoding, and editing, Full Unicode support, Accessibility in the authoring environment, Accessibility in Flash documents, Editing external scripts, Script navigator, ActionScript

New features available in Toreador only: Data binding, Device sound, Edit external scripts, External Players, Advanced Effects, Project workflow, Script navigator, String panel, Tab order indexing, Pro Player features

Some new AS commands:

MovieClip object:
_lockroot - Forces references to _root in a movie clip or its children to resolve to that movie clip
getInstanceAtDepth - Returns the movie clip instance found at the specified depth
getNextHighestDepth - Returns the next highest "z" order depth available

Context Menu object:
Context Menu - Objects for customizing context menus

Mouse object:
onMouseWheel - Listener invoked when mouse wheel is scrolled

MovieClipLoader object:
MovieClipLoader - Object that can be used to load SWF and JPG files into a movie clip or level
onLoadComplete - Listener invoked when the download completes
onLoadError - Listener invoked when the download fails due to an error
onLoadProgress - Listener invoked when the download progresses by a Flash player defined amount
onLoadStart - Listener invoked when the download starts

The Flash 7 player stats.

Though I can only guess the function of some of the terms, the speed of the new player is 4 to 7 times faster than version 6 in almost everything.


:: Component Initialization Performance
Windows
Flash 6: 41 ms
Flash x: 7 ms

:: Filling Array Performance
Windows
Flash 6: 1929 ms
Flash x: 511 ms

:: Populate Data Grid Performance
is the time it takes to populate & sort the Data Grid component
Windows
Flash 6: 1353 ms
Flash x: 357 ms

:: Sort Data Grid Performance
Windows
Flash 6: 4098 ms
Flash x: 678 ms

Question : I wonder how much of the performance boost is caused by the new player and how much by revisited components
Mike Chambers replies : Those numbers are all player.