Units
What is a gibibyte (GiB)?
1,073,741,824bytes in a GiB
2³⁰ bytes: 7.37 % more than a gigabyte (10⁹ bytes).
A gibibyte is 2³⁰ bytes, 1,073,741,824. The name was introduced by the IEC in 1998 so that "gigabyte" could keep its SI meaning of exactly one billion bytes.
The arithmetic
- 2¹⁰ = 1,024; 2²⁰ = 1,048,576; 2³⁰ = 1,073,741,824
- 1,073,741,824 ÷ 1,000,000,000 = 1.0737 GB
- RAM comes in binary sizes: '16 GB' of memory is 16 GiB, 17.18 billion bytes
| Decimal | Bytes | Binary | Bytes | Binary is bigger by |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| kilobyte (KB) | 1,000 | kibibyte (KiB) | 1,024 | 2.4 % |
| megabyte (MB) | 1,000,000 | mebibyte (MiB) | 1,048,576 | 4.9 % |
| gigabyte (GB) | 1,000,000,000 | gibibyte (GiB) | 1,073,741,824 | 7.4 % |
| terabyte (TB) | 1,000,000,000,000 | tebibyte (TiB) | 1,099,511,627,776 | 10 % |
| petabyte (PB) | 1,000,000,000,000,000 | pebibyte (PiB) | 1,125,899,906,842,624 | 12.6 % |