| Exbibits per second (Eibit/s) | Gigaoctets per second (Go/s) |
|---|---|
| 1 Exbibit per second | 144115188.076 Go/s |
| 2 Exbibits per second | 288230376.152 Go/s |
| 3 Exbibits per second | 432345564.228 Go/s |
| 4 Exbibits per second | 576460752.303 Go/s |
| 5 Exbibits per second | 720575940.379 Go/s |
| 10 Exbibits per second | 1441151880.76 Go/s |
| 20 Exbibits per second | 2882303761.52 Go/s |
| 25 Exbibits per second | 3602879701.9 Go/s |
| 50 Exbibits per second | 7205759403.79 Go/s |
| 100 Exbibits per second | 14411518807.6 Go/s |
| Reference | Exbibits per second (Eibit/s) | Gigaoctets per second (Go/s) |
|---|---|---|
| A dial-up modem | 4.85723 × 10-14 Eibit/s | 0.000007 Go/s |
| Typical home broadband | 8.67362 × 10-11 Eibit/s | 0.0125 Go/s |
| Gigabit Ethernet | 8.67362 × 10-10 Eibit/s | 0.125 Go/s |
| Streaming a 4K film | 2.1684 × 10-11 Eibit/s | 0.003125 Go/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 gigaoctet per second is a unit of data transfer rate equal to one thousand million octets per second, or eight gigabits per second. Its symbol is Go/s. It is the unit of the fastest storage devices and of the buses inside a computer, where data moves between processor, memory and drive.
Solid-state drives on the current interface reach 3 to 14 gigaoctets per second, depending on the number of lanes they use and the generation of the bus. Each lane of the peripheral interconnect provides roughly 2 gigaoctets per second at the current generation, and a drive typically uses four of them. Doubling the generation doubles the rate, which is why the figures have risen so steadily.
Main memory is faster still. A modern memory channel delivers 30 to 60 gigaoctets per second, and a machine with several channels reaches hundreds. Graphics processors, which must feed thousands of arithmetic units at once, use memory with bandwidths measured in thousands of gigaoctets per second, at which point the unit gives way to teraoctets.
That hierarchy is what determines how a program performs. A processor can execute far more operations per second than memory can supply data for, so most fast software is written to keep data in the small fast caches rather than to fetch it repeatedly from main memory. The whole discipline of performance engineering rests on the size of these differences.
For everyday comparison, one gigaoctet per second copies a two-gigaoctet film in two seconds, and fills a one-teraoctet drive in about seventeen minutes. That is faster than the network in almost every home and faster than most external connections, so at this rate the bottleneck moves back to whatever is at the other end.
The unit also describes network links in the data centre. A ten-gigabit connection is 1.25 gigaoctets per second, a hundred-gigabit connection 12.5, and both are common between servers. Comparing a storage figure in octets with a network figure in bits requires the factor of eight, and forgetting it is how equipment gets mismatched.
One gigaoctet per second equals 1,000,000,000 octets per second, 8 gigabits per second, or about 0.9313 gibioctets per second.