| Yobibits per second (Yibit/s) | Gibibits per second (Gibit/s) |
|---|---|
| 1 Yobibit per second | 1.12589990684 × 1015 Gibit/s |
| 2 Yobibits per second | 2.25179981369 × 1015 Gibit/s |
| 3 Yobibits per second | 3.37769972053 × 1015 Gibit/s |
| 4 Yobibits per second | 4.50359962737 × 1015 Gibit/s |
| 5 Yobibits per second | 5.62949953421 × 1015 Gibit/s |
| 10 Yobibits per second | 1.12589990684 × 1016 Gibit/s |
| 20 Yobibits per second | 2.25179981369 × 1016 Gibit/s |
| 25 Yobibits per second | 2.81474976711 × 1016 Gibit/s |
| 50 Yobibits per second | 5.62949953421 × 1016 Gibit/s |
| 100 Yobibits per second | 1.12589990684 × 1017 Gibit/s |
| Reference | Yobibits per second (Yibit/s) | Gibibits per second (Gibit/s) |
|---|---|---|
| A dial-up modem | 4.63221 × 10-20 Yibit/s | 0.0000521541 Gibit/s |
| Typical home broadband | 8.27181 × 10-17 Yibit/s | 0.0931323 Gibit/s |
| Gigabit Ethernet | 8.27181 × 10-16 Yibit/s | 0.931323 Gibit/s |
| Streaming a 4K film | 2.06795 × 10-17 Yibit/s | 0.0232831 Gibit/s |
The yobibit per second is a unit of data transfer rate equal to two to the eightieth power bits per second, which is 1,024 zebibits per second. Its symbol is Yibit/s. It is the largest binary transfer rate the International Electrotechnical Commission has named, and the binary counterpart of the yottabit per second.
At this final step the binary and decimal conventions differ by 20.9 per cent, and that number is the conclusion of the argument the IEC prefixes were created to settle. A naming habit that was 2.4 per cent wrong at the kibibit has grown, through eight successive multiplications by 1.024, into a discrepancy of more than a fifth. No measurement system can carry an ambiguity that large.
The unit describes nothing. Global internet traffic runs at roughly an exabit per second, so a yobibit per second is over a million times the total communication of the human species. No link, no aggregate and no forecast reaches it, and none is expected to.
The binary series stops here because the decimal series stopped at yotta when the IEC standard was written in 1998. When ronna and quetta were added to the metric system in 2022, no matching binary names were defined, so a rate of two to the ninetieth bits per second has no accepted short form. That gap will presumably be filled if it is ever needed, which at present it is not.
Defining a rung of a ladder nobody has climbed still has a purpose. A system whose names run out forces its users to improvise, and improvised extensions conflict; writing the whole series out in advance means the rule, rather than a table of exceptions, is all anyone has to learn. That is the same reasoning that gave the metric system its complete prefix set.
For any reader of technical material the lesson of the whole binary series is a single character. Kibit/s, Mibit/s, Gibit/s, Tibit/s, Pibit/s, Eibit/s, Zibit/s and Yibit/s are binary; kbit/s, Mbit/s, Gbit/s, Tbit/s, Pbit/s, Ebit/s, Zbit/s and Ybit/s are decimal; and the difference between them widens from a rounding error to a fifth as you climb.
One yobibit per second equals 1,024 zebibits per second, 151,115,727,451,828,646,838,272 octets per second, or about 1.209 yottabits per second.
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.