Gib

GiB stands for gibibyte, a unit of digital information in the binary system. It equals 2^30 bytes, which is 1,073,741,824 bytes. The gibibyte is part of the binary prefixes used to express data sizes unambiguously in information technology. The symbol is GiB, with a capital G, a lowercase i to indicate the binary prefix, and a capital B for bytes.

In relation to other units, 1 GiB equals 1024 MiB, and equals 1,073,741,824 bytes. By extension, 1 MiB equals 1024 KiB, and 1 KiB equals 1024 bytes. This binary framework contrasts with the decimal gigabyte (GB), which is often defined as 10^9 bytes. Because GB is sometimes used loosely to mean the binary amount, the GiB designation helps avoid ambiguity in contexts such as memory capacity and software requirements.

Usage and context: GiB is commonly used to express memory or storage capacity in computing, especially for RAM, graphics memory, and sometimes disk or file sizes when precision is important. Operating systems and hardware specifications may display capacities in GiB or multiples thereof (MiB, KiB) to reflect binary multiples rather than decimal.

Standardization: The binary prefixes, including gibi-, mebi-, and tebi-, were formalized to remove ambiguity between binary and decimal multiples and are reflected in international standards maintained by IEC and ISO/IEC.

Example: A computer with 16 GiB of RAM contains 16 × 1,073,741,824 bytes = 17,179,869,184 bytes.