2 ms·
Why should we use 2^10? Bits matter in the small—a machine with a 12-bit word and 1024 words of memory or whatever was popular in the ’70s—but at the scale of g
by earthboundkid 6y ago
Why should we use 2^10? Bits matter in the small—a machine with a 12-bit word and 1024 words of memory or whatever was popular in the ’70s—but at the scale of gigabytes, individual bits don’t matter anymore, so may as well just use decimal because that’s what our number system is based on. I don’t see any point besides retro nostalgia to use base 2 after you move out of the each bit counts space.
- CydeWeys 6y agoSI prefixes are fine for mass/block storage and network speeds, because there's no particular reason they would fall precisely into buckets of powers of 2. But for CPU cache and system/GPU memory in particular, and maybe even some flash memory, it does continue to make sense to use MiB and GiB, because of the particular way that memory itself is addressed and packaged. Memory very much does fall precisely along power of 2 boundaries. For example, I recently bought two 32 GiB DIMMs for my computer. I guess you could call them 34.3597 GB DIMMs, but that's strictly worse! Knowing that they're exactly 32 GiB makes it makes it obvious that it takes 2^35 bit pointers to address every location by byte in one of those DIMMs (so they obviously require a 64-bit architecture to take advantage of!), or 2^36 bit pointers to address memory locations across both of them.
- earthboundkid 6y agoSure. I support the distinction of GiB for RAM and GB for everything else.