| Exbioctets per second (Eio/s) | Gibioctets per second (Gio/s) |
|---|---|
| 1 Exbioctet per second | 1073741824 Gio/s |
| 2 Exbioctets per second | 2147483648 Gio/s |
| 3 Exbioctets per second | 3221225472 Gio/s |
| 4 Exbioctets per second | 4294967296 Gio/s |
| 5 Exbioctets per second | 5368709120 Gio/s |
| 10 Exbioctets per second | 10737418240 Gio/s |
| 20 Exbioctets per second | 21474836480 Gio/s |
| 25 Exbioctets per second | 26843545600 Gio/s |
| 50 Exbioctets per second | 53687091200 Gio/s |
| 100 Exbioctets per second | 107374182400 Gio/s |
| Reference | Exbioctets per second (Eio/s) | Gibioctets per second (Gio/s) |
|---|---|---|
| A dial-up modem | 6.07153 × 10-15 Eio/s | 0.00000651926 Gio/s |
| Typical home broadband | 1.0842 × 10-11 Eio/s | 0.0116415 Gio/s |
| Gigabit Ethernet | 1.0842 × 10-10 Eio/s | 0.116415 Gio/s |
| Streaming a 4K film | 2.71051 × 10-12 Eio/s | 0.00291038 Gio/s |
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.
The gibioctet per second is a unit of data transfer rate equal to 1,073,741,824 octets per second, which is 1,024 mebioctets per second. Its symbol is Gio/s. It is the unit of memory bandwidth and of the fastest storage interfaces, and the binary counterpart of the gigaoctet per second, from which it differs by 7.4 per cent.
Memory is where the unit belongs most naturally. A memory channel transfers a fixed number of octets per clock cycle, and that number is a power of two, so the resulting bandwidth is a binary multiple of the clock frequency. A machine with several channels reaches tens of gibioctets per second, and an accelerator with stacked memory reaches thousands.
Storage has caught up. A fast solid-state drive on the current interface sustains several gibioctets per second, which means that for the first time the drive and the memory are within an order of magnitude of each other. That convergence has changed how software is written: the old assumption that reading from disc is thousands of times slower than reading from memory no longer holds.
The unit appears in benchmark output, in system monitoring displays and in the specifications of processor interconnects. All of these count in binary because the structures they measure are binary, and reporting the result with a decimal prefix would introduce a seven per cent error for the sake of a familiar-looking label.
For a sense of what the rate means, one gibioctet per second copies a two-gigaoctet film in under two seconds and fills a one-teraoctet drive in about a quarter of an hour. Anything at this speed is faster than every external connection in an ordinary building, so the limiting factor moves inside the machine.
The distinction from the decimal unit matters most in procurement and capacity planning. A specification that requires 10 gigaoctets per second and a system that delivers 10 gibioctets per second are not the same, and the difference of 7.4 per cent is the sort of margin that decides whether a design meets its requirement.
One gibioctet per second equals 1,073,741,824 octets per second, 1,024 mebioctets per second, or about 1.074 gigaoctets per second.