Megabit - Usage Conventions

Usage Conventions

• In Telecommunications, use of the correct SI definition of the unit is standard.
• Standard industry practice in RAM and ROM manufacture has been to use the Mb abbreviation in reference to the binary interpretation of the megabit. For example, a single discrete DDR3 chip specified at 512 Mb invariably contains 229 bits = 536870912bits = 512 Mibit of storage, or 671088648-bit bytes, variously referred to as either 64 mebibytes or 64 (binary) megabytes.
• During the 16-bit game console era, the megabit was a commonly used measure of the size (computer data storage capacity) of game cartridges. This size represented one mebibit (Mibit). The vast majority of SNES and Mega Drive (Genesis) games were produced on 8 megabit cartridges, although other sizes such as 4, 12, 16, 24, 32, and 48 megabit cartridges appeared. This usage continued on the Nintendo 64, with cartridge sizes ranging between 32 and 512 megabits.