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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 ...
The byte is a unit of digital information that most commonly consists of eight bits. 1 byte (B) = 8 bits (bit).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.
Bytes, or multiples thereof, are almost always used to specify the sizes of computer files and the capacity of storage units. Most modern computers and peripheral devices are designed to manipulate data in whole bytes or groups of bytes, rather than individual bits.
Therefore, a word of n bytes can contain up to (2n)−1 decimal digits, which is always an odd number of digits. A decimal number with d digits requires 1 / 2 (d+1) bytes of storage space. For example, a 4-byte (32-bit) word can hold seven decimal digits plus a sign and can represent values ranging from ±9,999,999.
That is, the value of an octal "10" is the same as a decimal "8", an octal "20" is a decimal "16", and so on. In a hexadecimal system, there are 16 digits, 0 through 9 followed, by convention, with A through F. That is, a hexadecimal "10" is the same as a decimal "16" and a hexadecimal "20" is the same as a decimal "32".
Binary-coded decimal (BCD) is a binary encoded representation of integer values that uses a 4-bit nibble to encode decimal digits. Four binary bits can encode up to 16 distinct values; but, in BCD-encoded numbers, only ten values in each nibble are legal, and encode the decimal digits zero, through nine.
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 ...
Mass storage devices are usually measured in decimal SI multiples, for example 1 TB = bytes. Confusingly, the storage capacity of a directly-addressable memory device, such as a DRAM chip, or an assemblage of such chips on a memory module, is specified as a binary multiple -- using the ambiguous prefix G rather than the IEC recommended Gi prefix.