binary-orders-of-magnitude.md

Binary Orders of Magnitude - A journey from the indivisible to the incomprehensible

2⁰ - 1 bit (b)

2¹ - 1 crumb

2² - 1 nibble,semioctet,halfbyte

2³ - 1 byte (B), octet

2⁴ - 16 bits

Commonly used as the size of an integer, and is capable of holding 2¹⁶ (65,536) different values.

2⁵ - 32 bits

Size of addresses in IPv4 Size of an integer capable of holding 2³² (4.2 Billion approx.) individual values

2⁶ - 8 bytes or 64 bits

Equivelant to 1 "word" on 64-bit computers. Think x86-62 PCs and Mac Computers.

Kilo is a prefix which means "Thousand" (1000)

2¹³ - 1024 bytes, or 8192 bits

Mega is a prefix denoting one "Million" (1,000,000 or 10⁶)

2²³ - 1 megabyte (MB)

Roughly 1000 KiloBytes. A bit smaller than the size of a desktop background (1920 X 1080)

2³³ - 1 gigabyte (GB) (1000 MB)

2⁴³ - 1 terabyte (TB) (1000 GB)

According to Ray Kurzweil, the size of a human's functional memory. Surely he's just guessing?

2⁵³ - 1 petabyte (PB) (1000 TB)

10 PB was in 2005 the estimated size of the [Library of Congress's] collection, including non-book materials.

2^63> 1 exabyte (EB) (1000 PB)

15 EB was the estimated storage space at Google's data warehouse as of 2013.

2⁷³ - 1 zetabyte (ZB) (1000 EB)

2⁸³ - 1 yottabyte (YB) (1000 ZB)

Kind of a dumb name.

End of standardized SI/IEC Binary prefixes!

Visualisation of the Orders of Magnitude