Discover

(Redirected from Giga)

:''For the Baroque dance, see ''gigue''. For the television station, see ''GIGA Television''.''
'giga-' (symbol: ''G'') is a prefix in the SI system of units denoting 10⁹, or 1,000,000,000 (1 thousand million). The ''Oxford English Dictionary'' reports the earliest written use of giga- in this sense to be in the Reports of the IUPAC 14th Conference in 1947: "The following prefixes to abbreviations for the names of units should be used..G giga- 10⁹×". Giga- comes from the Greek γίγας, meaning ''.
When referring to computing information units, such as gigabit or gigabyte, ''giga-'' can sometimes mean 1,073,741,824 (2³⁰), but can also denote 1,000,000,000 (10⁹). The exact definition being used is ambiguous, and must be determined from context. The binary prefix gibi- has been standardized for 2³⁰, while reserving giga- exclusively for 10⁹, to resolve this ambiguity, but has yet to achieve widespread usage. See Binary prefix.

Contents

Pronunciation

Common usage

See also

Notes and References

External links

Pronunciation

In English the initial G of ''giga'' can be pronounced with a soft G (as in ''gigantic'') or with a hard G (as in ''giggle''). According to the American writer Self, in the 1920s a German committee member of the International Electrotechnical Commission proposed giga- as a prefix for 10⁹, drawing on a verse by the humorous poet Christian Morgenstern that appeared in the third (1908) edition of ''Galgenlieder'' (Gallows Songs). This suggests a hard German ''g'' was originally intended as the pronunciation. Self was unable to ascertain at what point the soft ''g'' pronunciation became accepted, but as of 1995 current practice had returned to hard ''g''.^[1] A prominent example of the soft G pronunciation is found in the 1985 movie ''Back to the Future'', where ''gigawatts'' was pronounced as ''jigawatts''.

Common usage

★ gigabyte — for instance, in hard disk capacity, 120 GB = 120,000,000,000 bytes; in file sizes, 1 GB = 1,073,741,824 bytes (also termed a gibibyte to reduce ambiguity)

★ gigahertz — clock rate of a CPU, for instance, 3 GHz = 3,000,000,000 Hz

★ gigabit — bandwidth of a network, for instance, 1 Gbit = 1,000,000,000 bit/s

★ gigayear or gigaannum — one billion ($10^9$) complete Julian rotation periods of the Earth about the Sun. (sometimes abbr. Gyr, but the preferred usage is Ga)

See also

★ SI prefix

★ Binary prefix

★ gibibyte

★ Gigabit Ethernet

Notes and References

1. Kevin Self. (April 1995). "Technically speaking". ''Spectrum''.

External links

★ BIPM website