| Gibioctets per second (Gio/s) | Exbibits per second (Eibit/s) |
|---|---|
| 1 Gibioctet per second | 0.00000000745058059692 Eibit/s |
| 2 Gibioctets per second | 0.0000000149011611938 Eibit/s |
| 3 Gibioctets per second | 0.0000000223517417908 Eibit/s |
| 4 Gibioctets per second | 0.0000000298023223877 Eibit/s |
| 5 Gibioctets per second | 0.0000000372529029846 Eibit/s |
| 10 Gibioctets per second | 0.0000000745058059692 Eibit/s |
| 20 Gibioctets per second | 0.000000149011611938 Eibit/s |
| 25 Gibioctets per second | 0.000000186264514923 Eibit/s |
| 50 Gibioctets per second | 0.000000372529029846 Eibit/s |
| 100 Gibioctets per second | 0.000000745058059692 Eibit/s |
| Reference | Gibioctets per second (Gio/s) | Exbibits per second (Eibit/s) |
|---|---|---|
| A dial-up modem | 0.00000651926 Gio/s | 4.85723 × 10-14 Eibit/s |
| Typical home broadband | 0.0116415 Gio/s | 8.67362 × 10-11 Eibit/s |
| Gigabit Ethernet | 0.116415 Gio/s | 8.67362 × 10-10 Eibit/s |
| Streaming a 4K film | 0.00291038 Gio/s | 2.1684 × 10-11 Eibit/s |
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.
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.