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Commonly, a decimal SI metric prefix (such as kilo-) is used with bit and byte to express larger sizes (kilobit, kilobyte). But, this is usually inaccurate since these prefixes are decimal, whereas binary hardware size is usually binary. Customarily, each metric prefix, 1000 n, is used to mean a close approximation of a binary multiple, 1024 n ...
While 4-bit computing is mostly obsolete, 4-bit values are still used in the same decimal-centric roles they were developed for, and modern implementations are generally much wider and process multiple 4-bit values in parallel. An example of such a system is the HP Saturn design of the 1980s. By the 1990s, most such uses had been replaced by ...
1 bit: Answer to a yes/no question; 1 byte: A number from 0 to 255; 90 bytes: Enough to store a typical line of text from a book; 512 bytes = 0.5 KiB: The typical sector size of an old style hard disk drive (modern Advanced Format sectors are 4096 bytes). 1024 bytes = 1 KiB: A block size in some older UNIX filesystems
The International System of Units defines a series of decimal prefixes for multiples of standardized units which are commonly also used with the bit and the byte. The prefixes kilo (10 3 ) through yotta (10 24 ) increment by multiples of one thousand, and the corresponding units are the kilobit (kbit) through the yottabit (Ybit).
In both cases, the LSb and MSb correlate directly to the least significant digit and most significant digit of a decimal integer. Bit indexing correlates to the positional notation of the value in base 2. For this reason, bit index is not affected by how the value is stored on the device, such as the value's byte order. Rather, it is a property ...
The binary value of all eight bits set (or activated) is 11111111 2, equal to the hexadecimal value FF 16, the decimal value 255 10, and the octal value 377 8. One octet can be used to represent decimal values ranging from 0 to 255. The term octet (symbol: o [nb 1]) is often used when the use of byte might be ambiguous.
The integer data that are directly supported by the computer hardware have a fixed width of a low power of 2, e.g. 8 bits ≙ 1 byte, 16 bits ≙ 2 bytes, 32 bits ≙ 4 bytes, 64 bits ≙ 8 bytes, 128 bits ≙ 16 bytes. The low-level access sequence to the bytes of such a field depends on the operation to be performed.
The term nibble originates from its representing "half a byte", with byte a homophone of the English word bite. [4] In 2014, David B. Benson, a professor emeritus at Washington State University, remembered that he playfully used (and may have possibly coined) the term nibble as "half a byte" and unit of storage required to hold a binary-coded decimal (BCD) digit around 1958, when talking to a ...