| Zebioctets per second (Zio/s) | Tebioctets per second (Tio/s) |
|---|---|
| 1 Zebioctet per second | 1073741824 Tio/s |
| 2 Zebioctets per second | 2147483648 Tio/s |
| 3 Zebioctets per second | 3221225472 Tio/s |
| 4 Zebioctets per second | 4294967296 Tio/s |
| 5 Zebioctets per second | 5368709120 Tio/s |
| 10 Zebioctets per second | 10737418240 Tio/s |
| 20 Zebioctets per second | 21474836480 Tio/s |
| 25 Zebioctets per second | 26843545600 Tio/s |
| 50 Zebioctets per second | 53687091200 Tio/s |
| 100 Zebioctets per second | 107374182400 Tio/s |
| Reference | Zebioctets per second (Zio/s) | Tebioctets per second (Tio/s) |
|---|---|---|
| A dial-up modem | 5.92923 × 10-18 Zio/s | 0.00000000636646 Tio/s |
| Typical home broadband | 1.05879 × 10-14 Zio/s | 0.0000113687 Tio/s |
| Gigabit Ethernet | 1.05879 × 10-13 Zio/s | 0.000113687 Tio/s |
| Streaming a 4K film | 2.64698 × 10-15 Zio/s | 0.00000284217 Tio/s |
The zebioctet per second is a unit of data transfer rate equal to 1,024 exbioctets per second, or two to the seventieth power octets per second. Its symbol is Zio/s. It is the binary counterpart of the zettaoctet per second, and the two differ by 18.1 per cent.
A link running at this rate would transfer everything humanity has ever stored several times over in a single second. That is the plainest way to describe how far it lies beyond anything that exists, is planned, or has been seriously proposed. The unit is a name for a quantity, not a description of a thing.
It is worth being precise about why such names are still defined. A measurement system is a set of rules, and the value of a rule is that it applies without exception. The moment a system says that certain prefix-and-unit combinations are legal and others are not, every user must carry a table instead of a rule, and different users will carry different tables. Complete definition is cheaper and safer.
The physical obstacles are not merely large but qualitative. At a zebioctet per second, the energy needed to switch the required number of states, even at the thermodynamic minimum, becomes a substantial power; the practical figure for real electronics is many orders of magnitude above that; and the number of parallel channels required exceeds anything that could be built and cooled. These are not engineering targets.
The 18.1 per cent gap from the decimal unit continues the pattern that runs through the whole binary series. Each step multiplies the discrepancy by 1.024, so a convention that was harmless at the kibioctet has become, by this point, a difference no reader could overlook. Making that visible is the purpose the IEC prefixes serve.
In practice, a converter meets this unit only in a complete table or in a document exploring theoretical limits. Handling it correctly costs nothing and demonstrates that the tool applies its rules uniformly, which is the property that makes its ordinary answers trustworthy.
One zebioctet per second equals 1,024 exbioctets per second, 1,180,591,620,717,411,303,424 octets per second, or about 1.181 zettaoctets per second.
The tebioctet per second is a unit of data transfer rate equal to 1,024 gibioctets per second, or two to the fortieth power octets per second. Its symbol is Tio/s. It is the binary counterpart of the teraoctet per second, and the two differ by 10 per cent.
Nothing outside a large machine moves data this quickly. The rate describes the memory bandwidth of an accelerator with stacked memory, the internal fabric of a high-end processor package, or the aggregate throughput of a parallel filesystem spread across thousands of drives. All of these are built from binary structures, and their totals are binary quantities divided by time.
High-performance computing is where the unit is written most often. A supercomputer's storage system is specified by how many tebioctets per second it can deliver to the compute nodes, because that number determines how quickly a simulation can save its state and resume. A machine that computes quickly but writes slowly spends its time waiting.
The ten per cent difference from the decimal unit is significant in that context. A filesystem procured to deliver 10 teraoctets per second and one delivering 10 tebioctets per second differ by a whole teraoctet per second, which in a facility of that size represents a substantial fraction of the hardware budget.
In bits a tebioctet per second is 8 tebibits per second, and in decimal terms about 1.1 teraoctets per second. Expressing the same rate four different ways is routine at this level, because the storage industry, the memory industry, the network industry and the standards bodies each prefer a different one.
For everyday comparison, a tebioctet per second would fill a large consumer hard drive in about twenty seconds. No external interface carries this; the figure describes movement between components inside a single system, where the wires are short and there are very many of them running in parallel.
Graphics processors have brought the rate within reach of a single component. A stack of high-bandwidth memory bonded directly to the processor die delivers well over a tebioctet per second to the chip that uses it, and a card carrying several such stacks passes a few. That bandwidth, rather than raw arithmetic speed, is what limits the training of large models: the arithmetic units sit idle unless the memory can keep them fed. The same reasoning explains why supercomputer designers spend as much effort on the paths between memory and processor as on the processors themselves, and why the rate is quoted in binary units when the memory it describes is addressed in powers of two.
One tebioctet per second equals 1,024 gibioctets per second, 1,099,511,627,776 octets per second, or about 1.100 teraoctets per second.