| Yobioctets (Yio) | Exbibits (Eibit) |
|---|---|
| 1 Yobioctet | 8388608 Eibit |
| 2 Yobioctets | 16777216 Eibit |
| 3 Yobioctets | 25165824 Eibit |
| 4 Yobioctets | 33554432 Eibit |
| 5 Yobioctets | 41943040 Eibit |
| 10 Yobioctets | 83886080 Eibit |
| 20 Yobioctets | 167772160 Eibit |
| 25 Yobioctets | 209715200 Eibit |
| 50 Yobioctets | 419430400 Eibit |
| 100 Yobioctets | 838860800 Eibit |
| Reference | Yobioctets (Yio) | Exbibits (Eibit) |
|---|---|---|
| A plain text message (160 characters) | 1.32349 × 10-22 Yio | 1.11022 × 10-15 Eibit |
| A three-minute MP3 | 2.48154 × 10-18 Yio | 2.08167 × 10-11 Eibit |
| A smartphone photo | 3.30872 × 10-18 Yio | 2.77556 × 10-11 Eibit |
| A high-definition film | 3.30872 × 10-15 Yio | 0.0000000277556 Eibit |
| A dual-layer Blu-ray disc | 4.1359 × 10-14 Yio | 0.000000346945 Eibit |
The yobioctet is a unit of digital information equal to two to the eightieth power octets, which is 1,024 zebioctets. Its symbol is Yio. It is the largest binary unit the International Electrotechnical Commission has named, and the binary counterpart of the yottaoctet.
At this final step the binary and decimal conventions differ by 20.9 per cent. That is the end of the argument the IEC prefixes were created to settle: a difference that began as a harmless 2.4 per cent at the kibioctet has grown, by eight successive multiplications of 1.024, into a discrepancy of more than a fifth. No system of measurement can carry an ambiguity that large.
A yobioctet is 1,208,925,819,614,629,174,706,176 octets. The entire quantity of data held by humanity is a few hundred zettaoctets, which is a fraction of a per cent of this. Nothing of this size has been built, and current manufacturing rates would need to continue for many centuries to accumulate one.
The binary series stops at yobi 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 quantity of two to the ninetieth octets has no accepted short form. That gap will presumably be filled if it is ever needed.
The value of defining the top of a ladder nobody has climbed is the same as the value of defining the bottom. A measurement system whose names run out forces its users to improvise, and improvised extensions conflict. Both the metric and the IEC series were written out in full so that the rule, rather than a table of exceptions, is all anyone has to learn.
For any reader of technical material, the lesson of the whole series is one character. Kio, Mio, Gio, Tio, Pio, Eio, Zio and Yio are binary; ko, Mo, Go, To, Po, Eo, Zo and Yo are decimal; and the difference between them widens from a rounding error to a fifth as you climb. That lowercase i is the only thing in a document that says which was meant.
One yobioctet equals 1,024 zebioctets, 1,208,925,819,614,629,174,706,176 octets, 8 yobibits, or about 1.209 yottaoctets.
The exbibit is a unit of digital information equal to two to the sixtieth power bits, which is 1,024 pebibits. Its symbol is Eibit. It is the binary counterpart of the exabit, and the two now differ by 15.3 per cent.
Two to the sixtieth is a number with a particular importance in computing, because sixty is close to the sixty-four bits of a modern processor address. A 64-bit machine can address sixteen exbioctets of memory, and that figure — 16 EiB — is the theoretical ceiling of the entire architecture. It appears in processor manuals, in operating system documentation and in the specification of every 64-bit filesystem.
No machine comes close to using that range. Current processors implement only forty-eight or fifty-seven of those sixty-four address bits, because wiring the full width would cost silicon for an address space nobody can fill. The unused bits are reserved, and widening the implementation is a straightforward matter whenever memory sizes make it worthwhile, which is the point of having chosen sixty-four in the first place.
An exbibit is 144,115,188,075,855,872 octets, or 128 pebioctets. That is more storage than any single organisation holds, and comparable to the combined annual output of a large part of the storage industry. As with all the larger binary units, it describes limits and capacities in specifications rather than anything that has been built.
The unit is also where filesystem designers set their maximum sizes. Filesystems built around 64-bit block pointers naturally have limits at exact powers of two, and several widely deployed ones specify maximum volume sizes in exbioctets. Those numbers are not aspirations; they are the arithmetic consequence of the pointer width, and they will hold until the architecture changes.
Reading the symbol correctly matters here. Eibit is the exbibit; Ebit is the exabit; EB and EiB are the octet forms of each. In a document where a fifteen per cent difference is significant — and at this scale it always is — the presence or absence of the lowercase i carries the entire meaning.
One exbibit equals 1,024 pebibits, 144,115,188,075,855,872 octets, or about 1.153 exabits.