Orders of magnitude (data)

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This is a list of orders of magnitude for data (or information), measured in bits. This article assumes a formal attitude towards terminology. That means two things:

1. A group of 8 bits in a computer is called an octet. A byte is the same for most practical purposes, but does not equal 8 bits on all computer architectures.
2. The decimal prefixes kilo, mega etc. are strictly powers of 10. The powers of 2 are the binary prefixes kibi, mebi etc.

Accordingly, 8192 bits of data are a kibioctet and 8000 bits are a kilooctet.

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Contents 1 1 bit 2 10 bits 3 10^2 bits – One hectobit 4 10^3 bits – One kilobit 5 10^4 bits 6 10^5 bits 7 10^6 bits – One megabit 8 10^7 bits 9 10^8 bits 10 10^9 bits – One gigabit 11 10^10 bits 12 10^11 bits 13 10^12 bits – One terabit 14 10^13 bits 15 10^14 bits 16 10^15 bits – One petabit 17 10^16 bits 18 10^17 bits 19 10^18 bits – One exabit 20 10^22 bits 21 External links

[edit] 1 bit

• 1 bit – True or false.
• 3 bits – The size of an octal digit.
• 4 bits – A semioctet or nibble (sometimes spelled nybble). The size of a hexadecimal digit.
• 5 bits – Size of code points in the Baudot code, used in telex communication.
• 6 bits – Size of code points in the Braille code, a tactile writing system for the blind.
• 7 bits – Size of code points in the ASCII character set.
• 8 bits – An octet. Equivalent to a byte on many computer architectures.

[edit] 10 bits

• 10 bits – One decabit
  • minimum length to store a single group of 3 decimal digits.
  • minimum byte length to store a single octet with error-correcting memory.
  • minimum frame length to transmit a single octet with asynchronous serial protocols.
• 12 bits – Wordlength of the PDP-8 of Digital Equipment Corporation (built from 1965 -1990)
• 16 bits – In many programming languages, the size of an integer capable of holding 65,536 different values.
• 16 bits – The "word size" (instruction length) for the various "second generation" console systems, including: Super Nintendo, Sega Genesis
• 32 bits (4 octets) – Size of an integer capable of holding 4,294,967,296 different values.
• 32 bits – Size of an IEEE 754 single-precision floating point number.
• 32 bits – Size of addresses in IPv4, the current Internet protocol.
• 56 bits (7 octets) – Cipher strength of the DES encryption standard.
• 64 bits (8 octets) – Size of an integer capable of holding 18,446,744,073,709,551,616 different values.
• 64 bits – Size of an IEEE 754 double-precision floating point number.
• 80 bits (10 octets) – Size of an extended precision floating point number, for intermediate calculations that can be performed in floating point units of most processors of the x86 family.

[edit] 10^{^2} bits – One hectobit

• 100 bits – One hectobit
• 128 bits (16 octets) – Size of addresses in IPv6, the emerging Internet protocol.
  • Minimum cipher strength of the Rijndael and AES encryption standards, and of the widely used MD5 cryptographic message digest algorithm.
• 160 bits – Maximum key length of the SHA-1, standard Tiger (hash), and Tiger2 cryptographic message digest algorithms.
• 256 bits (32 octets) – Minimum key length for the recommended strong cryptographic message digests in 2004.
• 512 bits (64 octets) – Maximum key length for the standard strong cryptographic message digests in 2004.

[edit] 10^{^3} bits – One kilobit

• 1,024 bits (2¹⁰ bits, 128 octets) – One kibibit.
• 1,288 bits – Approximate maximum capacity of a standard Magnetic stripe card.
• 4,096 bits (2¹² bits, 512 octets) – Typical sector size, and minimum space allocation unit on computer storage volumes, with most file systems.
• 4,704 bits (588 octets) – Uncompressed single-channel frame length in standard MPEG audio (75 frames per second and per channel), with medium quality 8-bit sampling at 44,100 Hz (or 16-bit sampling at 22,050 Hz).
• 8,000 bits (10³ octets) – One kilooctet.
• 8,192 bits (2¹³ bits, 1,024 octets) – One kibioctet.
• 9,408 bits (1,176 octets) – Uncompressed single-channel frame length in standard MPEG audio (75 frames per second and per channel), with standard 16-bit sampling at 44,100 Hz.

[edit] 10^{^4} bits

• 15,350 bits – one screen of data displayed on an 8-bit monochrome text console (80x24)
• 20 - 50 kbits – one page of typewritten text (uncompressed, depends on size of type and number of possible glyphs)

[edit] 10^{^5} bits

• 100 kbits – approximate size of this article

[edit] 10^{^6} bits – One megabit

• 1,978,560 bits – A one-page, standard-resolution black-and-white fax (1728 × 1145 pixels).
• 4,147,200 bits – One frame of uncompressed NTSC DVD video (720 × 480 × 12 bpp Y'CbCr).
• 4,976,640 bits – One frame of uncompressed PAL DVD video (720 × 576 × 12 bpp Y'CbCr).

[edit] 10^{^7} bits

• 11,520,000 bits – Capacity of a lower-resolution computer monitor (as of 2006), 800 × 600 pixels, 24 bpp.
• 11,796,480 bits – Capacity of a 3.5" floppy disk, colloquially known as 1.44 megabyte but actually 1.44 × 1000 × 1024 bytes.
• 25 Mbits – Amount of data in a typical color slide.
• 30,402,457 bits – Size of the largest known Mersenne prime. All of its bits are 1.
• 46,080,000 bits – Capacity of a high-resolution computer monitor (as of 2006), 1600 × 1200 pixels, 24 bpp.
• 50–100 megabits – Amount of information in a typical phone book.

[edit] 10^{^8} bits

• 150 Mbits – Amount of data in a large foldout map.
• 423,360,000 bits: A 5-minute-length audio recording, in CDDA quality

[edit] 10^{^9} bits – One gigabit

• 5.45×10⁹ bits (650 mebioctets) – Capacity of a regular compact disc.
• 5.89×10⁹ bits (702 mebioctets) – Capacity of a large regular compact disc.
• 6.4×10⁹ bits – Capacity of the human genome, 3.2 billion base pairs (each pair counts 2 for 2 bits of data).

[edit] 10^{^10} bits

• 4.04×10¹⁰ bits (4.7 gigaoctets) – capacity of a single-layer, single-sided DVD.
• 2.16×10¹⁰ bits (2.7 gigabytes) – size of the English Wikipedia without images (Compressed it is 1.1 gibibytes).

[edit] 10^{^11} bits

• 1.46×10¹¹ bits (17 gigaoctets) – Capacity of a double-sided, dual-layered DVD.
• 2.15×10¹¹ bits (25 gigaoctets) – Capacity of a single-sided, single-layered 12 cm Blu-ray disc

[edit] 10^{^12} bits – One terabit

• 10¹² bits (125 gigaoctets) – Approximate size of all Wikimedia projects.
• 1,099,511,627,776 bits (2⁴⁰ bits, more than 137 gigaoctets) – One tebibit.
• 1.6×10¹² bits (200 gigaoctets) – Capacity of a hard disk that would be considered moderately large in 2004.
• (approximately) 4.12×10¹² bits (515 gibioctets) – As of 2002, data of pi to the largest number of digits ever calculated (1.24 trillion).

[edit] 10^{^13} bits

• 1×10¹³ bits (1.25 teraoctets) – capacity of a human being's functional memory, according to Raymond Kurzweil in The Singularity Is Near, p. 126.

[edit] 10^{^14} bits

• 1.5×10¹⁴ bits (18.75 teraoctets) – Amount of information in the Library of Congress, if it were all digitized.

[edit] 10^{^15} bits – One petabit

• 2.4×10¹⁵ bits (300 teraoctets) – Size of the Internet Archive in 2004.
• 8,000,000,000,000,000 bits (10¹⁵ octets) – One petaoctet

[edit] 10^{^16} bits

• 4.5×10¹⁶ bits (5.625 petaoctets) – Estimated hard drive space in Google's server farm in 2004.

[edit] 10^{^17} bits

• 8 ×10¹⁷, Data's storage capacity

[edit] 10^{^18} bits – One exabit

exbibit

• 1.6×10¹⁸ bits (200 petaoctets) – Total amount of printed material in the world.

[edit] 10^{^22} bits

• 1.8×10²² bits (2.25 zettaoctets) – amount of information which can be stored in 1 gram of DNA

[edit] External links

• [1] Collection of estimates of the quantities of data contained by the various media.