| Exbibits per second (Eibit/s) | Pebibits per second (Pibit/s) |
|---|---|
| 1 Exbibit per second | 1024 Pibit/s |
| 2 Exbibits per second | 2048 Pibit/s |
| 3 Exbibits per second | 3072 Pibit/s |
| 4 Exbibits per second | 4096 Pibit/s |
| 5 Exbibits per second | 5120 Pibit/s |
| 10 Exbibits per second | 10240 Pibit/s |
| 20 Exbibits per second | 20480 Pibit/s |
| 25 Exbibits per second | 25600 Pibit/s |
| 50 Exbibits per second | 51200 Pibit/s |
| 100 Exbibits per second | 102400 Pibit/s |
| Reference | Exbibits per second (Eibit/s) | Pebibits per second (Pibit/s) |
|---|---|---|
| A dial-up modem | 4.85723 × 10-14 Eibit/s | 4.9738 × 10-11 Pibit/s |
| Typical home broadband | 8.67362 × 10-11 Eibit/s | 0.0000000888178 Pibit/s |
| Gigabit Ethernet | 8.67362 × 10-10 Eibit/s | 0.000000888178 Pibit/s |
| Streaming a 4K film | 2.1684 × 10-11 Eibit/s | 0.0000000222045 Pibit/s |
The exbibit per second is a unit of data transfer rate equal to two to the sixtieth power bits per second, which is 1,024 pebibits per second. Its symbol is Eibit/s. It is the binary counterpart of the exabit per second, and the two differ by 15.3 per cent.
That fifteen per cent is more than the margin most engineering work allows anywhere. A quantity stated in the wrong convention at this level is not slightly imprecise but plainly wrong, and no amount of context recovers the intended figure once it has been written ambiguously. This is the situation the IEC prefixes were introduced to prevent.
No physical link approaches this rate. The unit describes aggregates: the total instantaneous traffic of the whole internet is roughly an exabit per second, so a binary exbibit per second is fifteen per cent more than everything moving on every network on the planet at a given moment.
Where a binary figure of this size arises naturally is in address arithmetic rather than in transmission. Two to the sixtieth is a number that appears throughout the design of 64-bit systems, and any rate derived from filling or traversing such an address space in a fixed time is naturally binary. Those calculations are theoretical, but they are the reason the unit is defined rather than left unnamed.
In octets an exbibit per second is 144,115,188,075,855,872, or 128 pebioctets per second. That is more storage moved per second than the world manufactures in several years, which is a way of saying that no source and no destination for such a flow could exist.
For a converter the treatment is mechanical and must be exact. Eibit/s and Ebit/s differ by an eighth, and a tool that treats them as interchangeable has introduced an error larger than the difference between many neighbouring units. The lowercase i is not decoration.
One exbibit per second equals 1,024 pebibits per second, 144,115,188,075,855,872 octets per second, or about 1.153 exabits per second.
The pebibit per second is a unit of data transfer rate equal to 1,024 tebibits per second, which is two to the fiftieth power bits per second. Its symbol is Pibit/s. It is the binary counterpart of the petabit per second, and the two differ by 12.6 per cent.
No deployed system runs at this rate, and the unit therefore describes either an aggregate or a laboratory result. Optical transmission records set on single fibres reach a petabit per second, and the binary figure for the same experiment is 12.6 per cent lower — a difference that matters when comparing results between papers that use different conventions.
Where the unit is genuinely appropriate is in describing structures built from powers of two. The total switching capacity of a very large network fabric, built from ports and buffers that are all binary, is a binary quantity divided by time, and reporting it in decimal units discards the arithmetic that produced it. The same applies to the summed memory bandwidth of a machine whose channel count is a power of two.
In octets a pebibit per second is 140,737,488,355,328, which is 128 tebioctets per second. That is the storage of a thousand large consumer drives moved every second, and it exists only as a total across many thousands of parallel paths inside a single facility.
The size of the discrepancy at this level is the argument for the whole IEC series in miniature. What began as a harmless 2.4 per cent at the kibibit is now an eighth, and it compounds by 2.4 per cent at every further step. A convention that was acceptable for small numbers becomes untenable for large ones, and the point of the binary prefixes is to make the distinction visible before that happens.
For a converter, the arithmetic is unremarkable: multiply or divide by 1,024 the appropriate number of times, and by eight to reach octets. What matters is that the tool does not silently substitute the decimal unit when it sees a value it cannot label precisely.
One pebibit per second equals 1,024 tebibits per second, 140,737,488,355,328 octets per second, or about 1.126 petabits per second.