The General Conference on Weights and Measures had not ruled on new prefixes since 1991. An eternity when one thinks of progress in storage capacities.
Would you like a (very) little history lesson? Know that it was not until April 7, 1795 that the law ” relating to weights and measures “. It was she who set up the metric system in the young French republic.
One yottabyte every year
A law that obviously could not foresee the computer revolution and the need for ever more prefixes. Just think, by 2030, the world should be generating a whopping one yottabyte of data every year.
The yottaoctect does not speak to you? Be aware, however, that this prefix was put in place in 1991. It brought a little air to peta, exa and zetta, which were already too tight to translate the explosion of digital data.
You must know the gigabyte (109 bytes), most certainly also the terabyte (1012). Afterwards, it gets complicated: the petabyte is 1015 bytes and, in the same vein, we have exa for 1018 and zetta for 1021.
1 billion billion terabytes
At home, all this is hardly useful, but in the data centers of the largest IT companies, even the yottabyte (1024) is no longer sufficient. The prefix was put in place in 1991 and it was probably not thought that 30 years later it would be almost outdated.
On November 18, representatives from different countries around the world met at the General Conference on Weights and Measures (CGPM), which was held not far from Paris. The votes of these representatives led to the standardization of new prefixes and to the shelving of the informal hellaoctet and brontooctet, which never took root.
Beyond yottaoctet, it is therefore now possible to speak of ronnaoctet (1027) and quetabyte (1030). To try to figure out what this last prefix means, imagine that an SSD with 1 quetabyte of data can store 1 billion billion terabytes… Yeah, not sure that really means more!
The CGPM does not only look at these monstrously large prefixes and alongside the standardization of ronna and queta, there has also been talk of the infinitely small. So fronto (10-27) and quecto (10-30) have come to complete a range whose previous update also dates back to 1991.
Source : Nature
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