All right, let's be optimistic here: it's not going to entirely wipe power-hungry processors and memory off the charts anytime soon.
But there is at least an idea how to reduce the power consumption of semiconductor devices by a factor of 1 million.
The basic idea is to simply eliminate the flow of electrons, the ultimate source of power consumption. Researchers at the University of California at Berkeley said that magnetic processors could work without the need of electrons and function near the minimum power limit allowed by the second law of thermodynamics (Landauer limit). The project group estimates that a magnetic chip may only consume 18 millielectron volts of energy per operation at room temperature, which is about 1 million times below today's processors.
