| Gibibits per second (Gibit/s) | Exbioctets per second (Eio/s) |
|---|---|
| 1 Gibibit per second | 1.16415321827 × 10-10 Eio/s |
| 2 Gibibits per second | 2.32830643654 × 10-10 Eio/s |
| 3 Gibibits per second | 3.49245965481 × 10-10 Eio/s |
| 4 Gibibits per second | 4.65661287308 × 10-10 Eio/s |
| 5 Gibibits per second | 5.82076609135 × 10-10 Eio/s |
| 10 Gibibits per second | 0.00000000116415321827 Eio/s |
| 20 Gibibits per second | 0.00000000232830643654 Eio/s |
| 25 Gibibits per second | 0.00000000291038304567 Eio/s |
| 50 Gibibits per second | 0.00000000582076609135 Eio/s |
| 100 Gibibits per second | 0.0000000116415321827 Eio/s |
| Reference | Gibibits per second (Gibit/s) | Exbioctets per second (Eio/s) |
|---|---|---|
| A dial-up modem | 0.0000521541 Gibit/s | 6.07153 × 10-15 Eio/s |
| Typical home broadband | 0.0931323 Gibit/s | 1.0842 × 10-11 Eio/s |
| Gigabit Ethernet | 0.931323 Gibit/s | 1.0842 × 10-10 Eio/s |
| Streaming a 4K film | 0.0232831 Gibit/s | 2.71051 × 10-12 Eio/s |
The gibibit per second is a unit of data transfer rate equal to 1,073,741,824 bits per second. Its symbol is Gibit/s. It is the binary counterpart of the gigabit per second, and the two now differ by 7.4 per cent, which is enough to matter in any engineering specification.
The unit belongs to the inside of a machine rather than to the network. Memory buses, processor interconnects and the links between chips on the same board all move a power-of-two number of bits per clock cycle, so their throughput is naturally expressed with a binary prefix. A bus sixty-four bits wide clocked at a given frequency delivers a rate that is a binary multiple of that frequency.
Networking, by contrast, is decimal all the way down. Gigabit Ethernet carries exactly one thousand million bits per second, not 1,073,741,824, and the symbol rate on the wire is chosen to make that so. Confusing the two overstates a link's capacity by seven per cent, which in a capacity plan is the difference between adequate and insufficient.
In octets a gibibit per second is 134,217,728, or 128 mebioctets per second. That is close to the throughput of a fast mechanical hard drive and well below a modern solid-state drive, so it sits at the point where storage and internal buses meet and where matching their rates becomes a design question.
Benchmark tools are the commonest place to see the unit written correctly. A memory bandwidth test that allocates buffers in powers of two and measures how long they take to traverse naturally reports in gibibits or gibioctets per second, and a well-written tool says so explicitly rather than rounding to the decimal unit.
The reason to insist on the distinction here rather than lower down the scale is arithmetic. At the kibibit the gap was 2.4 per cent and could be ignored; here it is nearly a thirteenth, and it grows by a further 2.4 per cent at every step above. Getting into the habit at this level costs nothing and avoids compounding errors later.
One gibibit per second equals 1,073,741,824 bits per second, 134,217,728 octets per second, or about 1.074 gigabits per second.
The exbioctet per second is a unit of data transfer rate equal to 1,024 pebioctets per second, or two to the sixtieth power octets per second. Its symbol is Eio/s. It is the binary counterpart of the exaoctet per second, and the two differ by 15.3 per cent.
No machine, network or aggregate reaches this rate. An exbioctet per second is more than eight times the total instantaneous traffic of the entire internet, and it would move the world's whole stock of stored data in a matter of minutes. The unit describes a capacity with no source that could supply it and no destination that could take it in.
Two to the sixtieth is nevertheless a familiar number in computing, because it is the size of the address space a 64-bit machine can reach in octets divided by sixteen. The same power of two turns up in filesystem limits, in memory maps and in the design of every system built on that architecture, so the quantity is well known even though no rate approaches it.
The unit exists because the IEC series was defined completely. Every binary prefix pairs with every unit, exactly as every metric prefix does, so that a reader who has never seen Eio/s can decode it from the prefix alone. A system with gaps would need a table of permitted combinations, which is precisely what a rule-based system exists to avoid.
The difference from the decimal unit is worth restating at each level because it compounds. At the kibioctet it was 2.4 per cent, here it is more than an eighth, and at the yobioctet it will be more than a fifth. That growth is the reason the binary prefixes were created, and it is why the lowercase i has to be written even in figures nobody will check.
For a converter, the treatment is mechanical: six multiplications by 1,024 from octets, or the equivalent divisions coming down. The value of doing it correctly is not that anyone will use the result, but that a tool which handles every case the same way can be trusted on the cases that matter.
One exbioctet per second equals 1,024 pebioctets per second, 1,152,921,504,606,846,976 octets per second, or about 1.153 exaoctets per second.