The order of magnitude of data may be specified in strictly standards-conformant units of information and multiples of the bit and byte with decimal scaling, or using historically common usages of a few multiplier prefixes in a binary interpretation which has been common in computing until new binary prefixes were defined in the 1990s..
Commonly, a decimal SI metric prefix (such as kilo-) is used with bit and byte to express larger sizes (kilobit, kilobyte).
For comparison, the Avogadro constant is 6.02214076×1023 entities per mole, based upon the number of atoms in 12 grams of carbon-12 isotope.
– the "word size" for 8-bit console systems including: Atari 2600, Nintendo Entertainment System – minimum bit length to store a single byte with error-correcting computer memory – minimum frame length to transmit a single byte with asynchronous serial protocols – the Basic Multilingual Plane of Unicode, containing character codings for almost all modern languages, and a large number of symbols – the basic unit in UTF-16; the full Universal Character Set (Unicode) can be encoded in one or two of these – commonly used in many programming languages, the size of an integer capable of holding 65,536 different values – equivalent to 1 "word" on 16-bit computers (IBM PC, Commodore Amiga) – the "word size" for 16-bit console systems including: Sega Genesis, Super Nintendo, Mattel Intellivision – size of an integer capable of holding 4,294,967,296 different values – size of an IEEE 754 single-precision floating point number – size of addresses in IPv4, the current Internet Protocol – equivalent to 1 "word" on 32-bit processors, including those for the Apple Macintosh, Pentium-based PC, PlayStation, GameCube, Xbox, Wii – size of an integer capable of holding 18,446,744,073,709,551,616 different values – size of an IEEE 754 double-precision floating point number – equivalent to 1 "word" on 64-bit computers (Power, PA-RISC, Alpha, Itanium, SPARC, x86-64 PCs and Macintoshes).
– the "word size" for 64-bit console systems including: Nintendo 64, PlayStation 2, PlayStation 3, Xbox 360 – size of addresses in IPv6, the successor protocol of IPv4 – minimum cipher strength of the Rijndael and AES encryption standards, and of the widely used MD5 cryptographic message digest algorithm – size of an SSE vector register, included as part of the x86-64 standard – minimum key length for the recommended strong cryptographic message digests as of 2004[update] – size of an AVX2 vector register, present on newer x86-64 CPUs – maximum key length for the standard strong cryptographic message digests in 2004 – size of an AVX-512 vector register, present on some x86-64 CPUs – typical sector size, and minimum space allocation unit on computer storage volumes, with most file systems – approximate amount of information on a sheet of single-spaced typewritten paper (without formatting)