Chapter 6: Brain Matters: Memory, Microprocessors, and BIOS 91
Yotta, yotta, zetta
It may seem all Greek to you, and much of it is;
computer designers use various suffixes and
symbols as shorthand to distinguish thousands,
millions, billions, and higher numbers. The
lowest of these is kilo,which means 1,000; when
applied to bits or bytes, though, think 1,024. Next
up is megafor million, and giga for billion. Here’s
the binary shorthand table for bits or bytes:Term Meaning Value in a Binary Number
Kb Kilobit 1,024 bits
KB Kilobyte 1,024 bytes
Mb Megabit 1,048,576 bits
MB Megabyte 1,048,576 bytes
Gb Gigabit 1,073,741,824 bits
GB Gigabyte 1,073,741,824 bytes
Tb Terabit 1,099,511,627,776 bits
TB Terabyte 1,099,511,627,776 bytes
Pb Petabit 1,125,899,906,842,624 bits
PB Petabyte 1,125,899,906,842,624 bytes
Eb Exabit 1,152,921,504,606,846,976 bits
EB Exabyte 1,152,921,504,606,846,976 bytes
Zb Zettabit 1,177,132,856,203,590,762,496 bits
ZB Zettabyte 1,177,132,856,203,590,762,496 bytes
Yb Yottabit 1,205,384,044,752,476,940,795,904 bits
YB Yottabyte 1,205,384,044,752,476,940,795,904 bytes
Much as I would like to take credit making it up,
the last two suffixes are for real and not some
inside reference to an old Seinfeldepisode. A
yottabyte, which is equal to 2 to the 80th power
if you’re counting bytes or about 10 to the 24th
power, or 1 septillion in the decimal world, gets
its name from the next-to-last letter of the Latin
alphabet.