Flops are... well flops don't really matter for home users.
A flop is merely how quickly a processor can change a 0 to a 1 (or vice versa). The more cores it has, then typically the more flops it can produce, and so even a cheap 8 core CPU is going to have a pretty big lead over a high powered quad core. But in the real world you don't measure performance by flops, you measure it in real world workloads. Flops is generally a better comparison for theoretical throughput in highly threaded server applications... and even then it does not always translate to real world performance.
What you want to look for are 2 things:
1) Single thread benchmarks. This would be things like real world performance of how quickly iTunes and other crap software can do things. Most simple programs (like office and web browser tabs) are single threaded, and so this is very important to get an idea of just how fast a processor is for day-to-day applicaitons
2) Game benchmarks. Again, not synthetic benchmarks, and not just any game benchmarks, but benchmarks of games you actually intend to play. Some will favor AMD, while others (most) will favor Intel.