INDUSTRY NEWS

Overbyte

Kibi, mebi, and gibi aren't the newest additions to the Teletubbies family. They're prefixes the International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC) has coined to replace the terms kilo, mega, and giga. These designations for 1000, 1 million, and 1 billion, respectively, derive from the modern metric system. However, the terms kilobyte and megabyte, for example, only approximate actual data capacity.

The reason for the discrepancy? Blame the binary code, says Geneva-based IEC, which writes global standards for electronic technologies. Electronic information is written in the ones and zeros of the code's two-digit format. The metric system, of course, is based on 10 digits. By definition, a kilobyte isn't 1000 bytes, but 1024 bytes, while a megabyte is 1,048,576 bytes. However, programmers at the dawn of the Information Age used the closest metric prefixes available to them. With the help of NIST, IEC adopted new prefixes that it believes are more accurate.

So, say hello to kibi (Ki), mebi (Mi), and gibi (Gi) and their siblings tebi (Ti), pebi (Pi), and exbi (Ei). The new terms represent exponentially increasing binary multiples. A kibibyte equals 2¹⁰ power, or 1024 bytes. A mebibyte equals 2²⁰, or 1,048,576 bytes. The prefixes parallel their metric counterparts and, asserts IEC, increase precision as the Information Age hurtles toward the 21st century.

MicroHome | Search | Current Issue | MicroArchives
Buyers Guide | Media Kit