Wednesday, January 23, 2013

[tuclahqu] Binary vs decimal metric prefixes

At which point does the discrepancy of binary prefixes (powers of 1024) and decimal prefixes (powers of 10) exceed a full unit?  Here are the thresholds using rounding and truncation:

21 Ki = 21,504 = 22 K
42 Ki = 43,008 = 43 K

11 Mi = 11,534,336 = 12 M
21 Mi = 22,020,096 = 22 M

7 Gi = 7,516,192,768 = 8 G
14 Gi = 15,032,385,536 = 15 G

This gigabyte threshold is particularly relevant as a typical amount of RAM memory sold these days, traditionally measured with binary prefixes, but now beneficial for a sleazy marketer to switch to decimal prefixes.

6 Ti = 6,597,069,766,656 = 7 T
11 Ti = 12,094,627,905,536 = 12 T

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