It does depend on context though. Transports often use 8b/10b, which is why SATA 6Gb/s is also 600 MB/s. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/8b/10b_encoding https://

It does depend on context though. Transports often use 8b/10b, which is why SATA 6Gb/s is also 600 MB/s. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/8b/10b_encoding https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/8b/10b_encoding A byte is also referred to the smallest addressable unit. Which in most cases is 8 bits but many (I guess mostly niche architectures) have much larger characters/bytes, and is still very much relevant.