Wired News: New Microchips Shun Transistors

It looks like the way to continue making computer processing devices smaller and smaller past the point of physical impossibility based on the current microchip manufacturing paradigm has been discovered: change the paradigm and use nanomagnets. This has a number of advantages besides making ever smalling processing devices.

the chip has no wires, its device density and processing power may eventually be much higher than transistor-based devices. And it won't be nearly as power-hungry, which will translate to less heat emission and a cooler future for portable hardware like laptops. Computers using the magnetic chips would boot up almost instantly. The magnetic chip's memory is non-volatile, making it impervious to power interruptions, and it retains its data when the device is switched off.

What I still would like to know is what the environmental implications are and what kind of time frames are we looking out before we have these things in our hands and on our desktops and what kind of costs are likely to be involved?
Wired News: New Microchips Shun Transistors:
Filed in: technology, microchips, Moore's_law, magnetic