Home Poll: Gigabytes vs. gibibytes
News

Poll: Gigabytes vs. gibibytes

Cyril Kowaliski
Disclosure
Disclosure
In our content, we occasionally include affiliate links. Should you click on these links, we may earn a commission, though this incurs no additional cost to you. Your use of this website signifies your acceptance of our terms and conditions as well as our privacy policy.

You may not know it, but the world of technology is split into two camps right now. For one camp, megabytes, gigabytes, and terabytes are all powers of 10. Hard drive makers are part of that clique, as is Apple, at least since the release of Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard. For the other camp—the traditionalists, if you will—those same units are powers of two. On that side of the ring, we find Microsoft, memory vendors, and just about anyone who doesn’t know the difference.

Some of the folks who subscribe to the base-10 way of thinking use another set of terms to define the powers of two that were standard for so long: mebibytes (MiB), gibibytes (GiB), and tebibytes (TiB). That scheme follows the IEEE 1541 standard, which defines a MiB as 220 bytes and a MB as 106 bytes. You might see that standard followed here and there in some open-source apps, but it’s far from having entered mainstream usage.

In today’s poll, we wanted to see how TR readers split up between those two camps. So, we’re asking a simple question: would you say a PC has 4GB of RAM or 4GiB? Take your pick in the poll below. You can also vote on our front page.

Last time, we asked about the season’s best PC games. 5183 readers gave us their two cents, and just over half of them were split between BioWare’s Dragon Age: Origins and Infinity Ward’s Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2. (The former won the contest with 27% of the vote.) At a safe distance behind the gold and silver medalists was Left 4 Dead 2 with the bronze medal, followed by runners-up Borderlands and Batman: Arkham Asylum. Other picks garnered 5% of the votes or less.

Latest News

Apple Might Join Hands with Google or OpenAI for Their AI Tech
News

Apple Is Reportedly Planning to Join Hands with Google or OpenAI to License Their AI Tools

YouTube Launches New Tool To Help Label AI-generated Content
News

YouTube Launches a New Tool to Help Creators Label AI-Generated Content

YouTube released a tool that will make creators clearly label the parts of their content that are generated by AI. The initiative was first launched in November in an attempt...

Ripple Dumps 240 Million XRP Tokens Amid 17% Price Decline
Crypto News

Ripple Dumps 240 Million XRP Tokens Amid 17% Price Decline

Popular crypto payment platform Ripple has released 240 million XRP tokens in its latest escrow unlock for March. This comes at a time when XRP’s price has declined significantly. Data from...

Crypto Expert Draws A Links Between Shiba Inu And Ethereum
Crypto News

Crypto Expert Draws Link Between Shiba Inu And Ethereum

The Lucrative FTX Bankruptcy Trade and Ongoing Legal Battle
Crypto News

The Lucrative FTX Bankruptcy Trade and Ongoing Legal Battle

Bitcoin (BTC) Price Set to Enter “Danger Zone” – Time to Back-Off or Bag More Coins?
Crypto News

Bitcoin (BTC) Price Set to Enter “Danger Zone” – Time to Back-Off or Bag More Coins?

SNB to Kick Off Rate Cut Cycle Sooner Than Expected
News

SNB to Kick-Start Rate Cut Cycle Sooner Than Expected