It should also be pointed out that terms such as million and billion may be defined differently in different countries. Some uses for metric system prefixes in the computer industry include terms for measuring memory sizes, data storage capacity, data transmission bandwidth, processor speed, and ratings of electronic components. Since computers work with the binary number system, some values in powers of 2 are represented by the closest equivalent values in the decimal metric system. This is mainly of concern with measuring memory sizes and data storage capacity. Note that these are not standard SI measurements.
SI prefixes are strictly decimal multipliers.
The binary forms of kilobytes and megabytes have become standard throughout the computer industry, although they are incorrect uses of the SI prefixes. The IEC and ISO, together with commitees from the IEEE have done some work on proposals for some new prefixes that could be used for binary forms of measurement in the computer world. It may be awhile before these are made official and even longer before they begin to be widely used. Drive manufacturers normally advertise drive capacity in decimal megabytes. Newer BIOSes will usually show drive capacity in CMOS setup using decimal megabytes, older BIOSes use binary megabytes.