| Gibibits per second (Gibit/s) | Exbibits per second (Eibit/s) |
|---|---|
| 1 Gibibit per second | 9.31322574615 × 10-10 Eibit/s |
| 2 Gibibits per second | 0.00000000186264514923 Eibit/s |
| 3 Gibibits per second | 0.00000000279396772385 Eibit/s |
| 4 Gibibits per second | 0.00000000372529029846 Eibit/s |
| 5 Gibibits per second | 0.00000000465661287308 Eibit/s |
| 10 Gibibits per second | 0.00000000931322574615 Eibit/s |
| 20 Gibibits per second | 0.0000000186264514923 Eibit/s |
| 25 Gibibits per second | 0.0000000232830643654 Eibit/s |
| 50 Gibibits per second | 0.0000000465661287308 Eibit/s |
| 100 Gibibits per second | 0.0000000931322574615 Eibit/s |
| Reference | Gibibits per second (Gibit/s) | Exbibits per second (Eibit/s) |
|---|---|---|
| A dial-up modem | 0.0000521541 Gibit/s | 4.85723 × 10-14 Eibit/s |
| Typical home broadband | 0.0931323 Gibit/s | 8.67362 × 10-11 Eibit/s |
| Gigabit Ethernet | 0.931323 Gibit/s | 8.67362 × 10-10 Eibit/s |
| Streaming a 4K film | 0.0232831 Gibit/s | 2.1684 × 10-11 Eibit/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 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.