Orders of magnitude (data)

An order of magnitude is a factor of ten. A quantity growing by four orders of magnitude implies it has grown by a factor of 10,000 or 104.– minimum length to store 2 decimal digits– Equivalent to 1 'word' on 8-bit computers (Apple II, Atari 800, Commodore 64, et al.).– the 'word size' (instruction length) for 8-bit console systems including: Atari 2600, Nintendo Entertainment System– minimum bit length to store a single byte with error-correcting computer memory– minimum frame length to transmit a single byte with asynchronous serial protocols– the Basic Multilingual Plane of Unicode, containing character codings for almost all modern languages, and a large number of symbols– the basic unit in UTF-16; the full Universal Character Set (Unicode) can be encoded in one or two of these– commonly used in many programming languages, the size of an integer capable of holding 65,536 different values– Equivalent to 1 'word' on 16-bit computers (IBM PC, Commodore Amiga)– the 'word size' (instruction length) for 16-bit console systems including: Sega Genesis, Super Nintendo, Mattel Intellivision– size of an integer capable of holding 4,294,967,296 different values– size of an IEEE 754 single-precision floating point number– size of addresses in IPv4, the current Internet protocol– Equivalent to 1 'word' on 32-bit computers (Apple Macintosh, Pentium-based PC).– the 'word size' (instruction length) for various console systems including: PlayStation, Nintendo GameCube, Xbox, Wii– size of an integer capable of holding 18,446,744,073,709,551,616 different values– size of an IEEE 754 double-precision floating point number– Equivalent to 1 'word' on 64-bit computers (Power, PA-Risc, Alpha, Itanium, Sparc, x86-64 PCs and Macintoshes).– the 'word size' (instruction length) for 64-bit console systems including: Nintendo 64, PlayStation 2, PlayStation 3, Xbox 360– size of addresses in IPv6, the successor protocol of IPv4– minimum cipher strength of the Rijndael and AES encryption standards, and of the widely used MD5 cryptographic message digest algorithm– size of an SSE vector register, included as part of the x86-64 standard– minimum key length for the recommended strong cryptographic message digests as of 2004– size of an AVX2 vector register, present on newer x86-64 CPUs– maximum key length for the standard strong cryptographic message digests in 2004– size of an AVX-512 vector register, present on some x86-64 CPUs– typical sector size, and minimum space allocation unit on computer storage volumes, with most file systems– approximate amount of information on a sheet of single-spaced typewritten paper (without formatting) An order of magnitude is a factor of ten. A quantity growing by four orders of magnitude implies it has grown by a factor of 10,000 or 104. This article presents a list of multiples, sorted by orders of magnitude, for digital information storage measured in bits. The byte is a common unit of measurement of information (kilobyte, kibibyte, megabyte, mebibyte, gigabyte, gibibyte, terabyte, tebibyte, etc.); for the purpose of this article, a byte is a group of 8 bits (octet), a nibble is a group of four bits. Historically, both assumptions have not always been true. The decimal SI prefixes kilo, mega, giga, tera, etc., are powers of 103 = 1000. The binary prefixes kibi, mebi, gibi, tebi, etc. respectively refer to the corresponding power of 210 = 1024. In casual usage, when 1024 is a close enough approximation of 1000, the two corresponding prefixes are equivalent.