Messages in this thread | | | Date | Wed, 27 Nov 1996 17:06:44 -0800 | From | "Leonard N. Zubkoff" <> | Subject | Re: GB vs. MB |
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Let's face it -- the original fault with KB/MB is in using the same prefixes that already had definitions for a different purpose. The scientific community has used K for kilo = 1000 and M for mega = 1000000 for quite a long time. The computer industry blew it badly by using K/kilo and M/mega for incompatible purposes. The marketeers have certainly done their part to encourage whichever interpretation looks bigger, but they didn't create the original problem.
It would be one thing if there were no overlap between computer and scientific uses, but that just isn't so. For example, the PCI bus can burst transfer at a theoretical maximum frequency of 33.0MHz times 4 bytes/transfer. So you would think that this totals 132.0 MB/second, and indeed that's the way it is usually reported. But that MB is million, not 2^20. If we insist on MB meaning 2^20, we only get 125.885MB/second. A similar problem occurs in other cases where mega is used in a frequency or 1/time context, such as Fast SCSI-2 being 10.0 mega-transfers/second. With MB = 2^20 Fast SCSI-2 is only good for 9.54 MB/second. We can't just move "mega" around without thinking in these contexts.
Since there's no truly consistent way to view this, I don't really care that much which way it's reported, so long as a footnote clearly specifies which meaning pertains. Since I've been working with SCSI a lot lately, I'm just as happy with MB = million for storage devices since it keeps the time/space computation easy.
Leonard
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