Giga-
Giga ( or ) is a unit prefix in the metric system denoting a factor of a short-scale billion or long-scale milliard (10 or ). It has the symbol G. "Giga" is derived from the Greek word ("gígas"), meaning "giant." The "Oxford English Dictionary" reports the earliest written use of "giga" in this sense to be in the Reports of the IUPAC 14th Conference in 1947: "The following prefixes to abbreviations for the names of units should be used: G giga 10×." When referring to information units in computing, such as gigabyte, giga may sometimes mean (2); this causes ambiguity . Standards organizations discourage this and use giga- to refer to 10 in this context too. "Gigabit" is only rarely used with the binary interpretation of the prefix. The binary prefix "gibi" has been adopted for 2, while reserving "giga" exclusively for the metric definition. Pronunciation. In English, the prefix "giga" can be pronounced (a hard "g" as in "giggle"), or (a soft "g" as in "gigantic", which shares "giga" Ancient Greek root). A prominent example of this latter pronunciation is found in the pronunciation of "gigawatts" in the 1985 film "Back to the Future". According to the American writer Kevin  Self, a German committee member of the International Electrotechnical Commission proposed "giga" as a prefix for 10 in the 1920s, drawing on a verse (evidently "Anto-logie") by the German humorous poet Christian Morgenstern that appeared in the third (1908) edition of his (Gallows Songs). This suggests that a hard German was originally intended as the pronunciation. Self was unable to ascertain when the (soft "g") pronunciation came into occasional use, but claimed that as of 1995 it had returned to (hard "g"). In 1998, a poll by the phonetician John C. Wells found that 84% of Britons preferred the  pronunciation of "gigabyte" starting with (as in "gig"), 9% with (as in "jig"), 6% with ("guy"), and 1% with (as in "giant"). Binary prefix. The notation can represent 1,073,741,824 (2) bytes or 1,000,000,000 bytes. Under the IEC 60027-2 A.2 and ISO/IEC 80000 standards, the correct notation of 2 is "gibi" (symbol Gi). distinction So one gibibyte () is 1,073,741,824 bytes or . Despite international standards, the use of = 2 B is widespread. A laptop advertised as having has 8,589,934,592 bytes of memory: , or .