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SCMP Reporter

Samsung recently announced it was developing a die for a one-giga DRAM chip - the first 1G DRAM in the world, with 1,074 million fully working cells.

  The company went on to talk about how it was designed to 0.18 micron (in other words, it works on a fine measure of geometry) and would have high speed and low power consumption.

  But Samsung did not say gigabit or gigabyte DRAM. Gigawhat? I say.

  It's a very important piece of the terminology.

  A bit is one binary number or digit - a 0 or 1.

  A byte is a group of bits that represents a character - usually eight-bit sets in the world of microcomputers. A nibble is supposedly four bits and a slice is one bit.

  A kilobit is actually 1,024 bits. A megabit is really 1,048,576 bits, roughly one million - not exactly.

 It is not a simple 1,000 in the case of kilo or one million in the case of mega. Kilo is actually two to the power of 10. And a megabit is really 1,024 kilobits.

  But when you talk of megabit and megabyte, or gigabit or gigabyte, there is a fair difference.

  When you buy a hard disk drive for a computer, it stores in terms of bytes. You will buy a disk with 810Mb (megabytes) or 1.5 GB (gigabytes).

   PC users store computer files that are usually generated with characters - they are stored in binary form - but unlike in the old days of computing, we don't start off a dear-john letter with '000011010101001011010 0101100101001011' and so on.

   But when you have system memory - not to be confused with data storage (which is what a hard disk does) - what is the correct terminology?    The data sheets of PCs typically say it 'comes standard with eight megs of DRAM, expandable to 32Mb of DRAM'.

  It will never explain whether it is megs of bits or megs of bytes. Megabits and megabytes have the same abbreviation (Mb), as do byte and bit (b).

  There is no other way of expressing this so that it could be recognised.

   Why this confusion? Surely, the techie companies must know. If they bundle the computers up themselves and load up software, they must know.

   Samsung invented the world's first Giga DRAM but is it fudging the numbers?     When Intel made its first memory chip it was a 64-bit chip. It chose the bigger number to make it sound better than eight-byte chip.

   But now we're talking millions and millions. I want to know if the RAM, DRAM, EDO DRAM, FAST EDO DRAM and SRAM that will come in my computer is the real thing.

   What am I getting, bits or bytes?   I posed the question to five companies: IBM (the inventor of the PC), Compaq (the world's biggest PC company), Samsung (the biggest memory chip producer), Microsoft (the biggest PC software company) and Hewlett-Packard (the world's second-biggest computer company).

    IBM, Compaq, Microsoft and HP all say they refer to megabytes when installing software or RAM.

  Samsung says it builds RAM chips in megabits, not megabytes. Bit of a problem there, I think.

  However, because the computer companies deal in megabytes, they sell enough memory modules to make up megabytes.

  A 16-megabit chip, for instance, is capable of handling two megabytes. So if the minimum requirement for a certain computer application is eight megabytes, the computer owner should install four 16-megabit chips.

   Simple. Well it should be.



Samsung chip causes bit of confusion over bytes