“It looks like the age of silicon may be coming to a close. Technological giant IBM wants to try using carbon nanotubes in chip design instead. Their emerging research on creating and manipulating these nanoscale structures could be the key to success. Moore’s Law has proved constant in the semiconductor industry, providing hope for more powerful computers. The law states that the number of transistors on a silicon chip doubles every 18 months, hence producing devices twice as powerful (typically). If a computer is slow today, never fear because just beyond the horizon is a new processor that could speed up computing significantly. Well, Moore’s Law may finally come to an end in 2020 which means beyond the horizon may be a processor that is only slightly better or cheaper. So how will modern computing keep up with power demand? What alternatives exist for such a computational problem? Some solutions seem rather simple while others are more exotic in nature. For example, to squeeze the most out of silicon may require a blast from the past with programmers aiming for optimization above all else. Object orientated programming is great for program creation but uses large amounts of resources—so programmers may shift to using assembly for routines that require speed. More efficient algorithms could also help with CPU efficiency as well as freeing up CPU resources for other operations.”