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The byte is a unit of digital information that most commonly consists of eight bits. Historically, the byte was the number of bits used to encode a single character of text in a computer [1][2] and for this reason it is the smallest addressable unit of memory in many computer architectures. To disambiguate arbitrarily sized bytes from the ...
Orders of magnitude (data) An order of magnitude is usually a factor of ten. Thus, four orders of magnitude is a factor of 10,000 or 10 4. This article presents a list of multiples, sorted by orders of magnitude, for units of information measured in bits and bytes. The byte is a common unit of measurement of information (kilobyte, kibibyte ...
Computers usually manipulate bits in groups of a fixed size, conventionally named "words". Like the byte, the number of bits in a word also varies with the hardware design, and is typically between 8 and 80 bits, or even more in some specialized computers. In the 21st century, retail personal or server computers have a word size of 32 or 64 bits.
Historically, a byte was the number of bits used to encode a character of text in the computer, which depended on computer hardware architecture, but today it almost always means eight bits – that is, an octet. An 8-bit byte can represent 256 (2 8) distinct values, such as non-negative integers from 0 to 255, or signed integers from −128 to ...
File size. File size is a measure of how much data a computer file contains or, alternately, how much storage it consumes. Typically, file size is expressed in units of measurement based on the byte. By convention, file size units use either a metric prefix (as in megabyte and gigabyte) or a binary prefix (as in mebibyte and gibibyte).
1 o = 8 bits. The octet is a unit of digital information in computing and telecommunications that consists of eight bits. The term is often used when the term byte might be ambiguous, as the byte has historically been used for storage units of a variety of sizes. The term octad (e) for eight bits is no longer common. [1][2]
1 MB = 1 048 576 bytes (= 1024 2 B = 2 20 B) is the definition used by Microsoft Windows in reference to computer memory, such as random-access memory (RAM). This definition is synonymous with the unambiguous binary unit mebibyte. In this convention, one thousand and twenty-four megabytes (1024 MB) is equal to one gigabyte (1 GB), where 1 GB is ...
Very often, when referring to the word size of a modern computer, one is also describing the size of address space on that computer. For instance, a computer said to be "32-bit" also usually allows 32-bit memory addresses; a byte-addressable 32-bit computer can address 2 32 = 4,294,967,296 bytes of memory, or 4 gibibytes (GiB). This allows one ...