Gibibyte

The gibibyte (symbol: GiB) is a unit of measurement in computers and similar electronic devices. One gibibyte holds 1024 mebibytes (MiB). Some people call this number of bytes the gigabyte. This would be considered the binary equivalent to the base-10 gigabyte, which consists of exactly one billion bytes.

The gibibyte is equivalent to 230 bytes (1 073 741 824 bytes) while the gigabyte is 109 bytes (1,000,000,000 or a billion bytes).

1024 gibibytes make one tebibyte.

Note on memory measuring

16GB memory bank for laptops (17.179.869.184 B)
A SODIMM memory bank of 16GB (equals to 17.179.869.184 Bytes)

While on storage GB effectively differs from GiB; using base 10 in memory is considered an error prone practice, and it's normally troublesome due to convention taken in the information technology market.


Generally GiB and GB are considered equal when measuring all volatile memory (RAM, Cache, vRAM, etc...)

  1. ↑ "Hard disk drive", Wikipedia, 2026-07-20, retrieved 2026-07-22
  2. ↑ Tanenbaum, Andrew S. "Structured Computer Organization" (PDF).
  3. ↑ "Transistor count", Wikipedia, 2026-07-11, retrieved 2026-07-22