New alternatives to silicon may increase chip speeds by orders of magnitude.

Consistent1 writes: A paywalled article in the "Nature Materials" journal describes the use of Magnetite to achieve ultra fast electronic switching, albeit, at the moment, only at extremely low temperatures. According to a story on Quartz, the team, led by Dr. Hermann Dürr from the Stanford Institute for Materials and Energy Sciences, hopes "to continue the experiment with materials that can operate at room temperature. One possibility is vanadium dioxide". Chips utilizing this technology may operate at clock cycles thousands of times faster than the silicon based chips used today.