Penguin and Flamingo are still sold because they are part of software bundle. Rhino 6 will have fast display algorithm and its rendering algorithm will probably be faster than Flamingo. Flamingo has always been buggy and the quality of its renderings have always been below average. The most useful part of Flamingo is its plant algorithm, especially groundcover. (The groundcover does not work due to a bug.) I suggest that Flamingo is discontinued, and its plant algorithm is incorporated into Rhino 6.
Flamingo is great for people like me who know nothing about rendering (and wish to keep it that way). Yet I can still get pretty good results. Our business is manufacturing, but occasionally I’m asked to render a job for a customer that is struggling with visualizing the final product or for brochures, website etc.
To me Flamingo is the perfect solution for “Rendering for Dummies”. I would hate to see it discontinued.
Dan
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Yes, Flamingo nXt is a wonderful render software indeed, a great blend of simplicity and quality.
Regards
Joao
I ran tests comparing Flamingo nXt 5.0 running inside Rhino 5 with Cycles running inside Rhino 6.1. I set Cycles to final quality. I could not test Flamingo running inside Rhino 6.1 due to Flamingo installation bug. I did not use any lights. Flamingo test, including saving the image, ran for about 40 seconds. Cycles test ran for 10 seconds. Cycles is much faster than Flamingo because it uses both CPU and GPU. (My ThinkPad W530 laptop has Quadro K2000M GPU.) The following test images prove superior quality of the Cycles renderer. Flamingo is dead!
Flamingo nXt 5.0 running inside Rhino 5:
Cycles running inside Rhino 6.1:
The Cycles renders looks like a screenshot of the rendered mode only, no GI. Are you sure you like it more than the Flamingo result? 
There’s no accounting for taste. If you do not like it, you can tweak it, but you cannot tweak the obvious flaws of the Flamingo image.
cycles runs together cpu and GPU for rendering? are you sure?
since version n?
Yes, I am sure.
“Unified rendering kernel for CPU and GPU” source: https://www.cycles-renderer.org/about/
details of GPU rendering:
https://docs.blender.org/manual/en/dev/render/cycles/gpu_rendering.html
Flamingo is dead. McNeel is in decline.
Wow, you’re quite the negative Nancy, or should I say negative Nowicki. 
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does it work into rhino cycles?
Yes, it does. You can ask more questions here: Cycles for Rhino
i knew rhino supports cycles since r6
but i mean, GPU and CPU work in cycles for rhino together?
McNeel claims that they work at the same time.
I used MS Windows Task Manager to monitor CPU load and GPU load. I used GPU-Z utility to monitor GPU load. When I tumble the viewport, only GPU is used. When I render simple drawing, the viewports are frozen and only CPU is used.
Well, yes, but CPU support in these GPU renderers is basically just so that you can render something with a crappy old GPU or if some bug/unsupported feature causes GPU rendering to fail, a good GPU or two are so astronomically faster than any CPU that you won’t bother enabling it.
There’s no Cyles “render” yet, just the viewport mode. At some point it’s been said it will replace the old basic Rhino renderer.
CPU+GPU is possible if you chose OpenCL (and the necessary bits have been tweaked), but you don’t really want to do that. Currently the slowest device dictates the overall speed. I test regularly with CPU+AMD+Nvidia OpenCL combo to ensure everything still works - the speed is about 3x CPU speed since the CPU is the slowest of the three. On modern machines you will want to keep the CPU out of the Raytraced loop for now.