Why do storage and memory follow a pattern of 2 (i.e. 2, 4, 8, 16, 32, 64, 128, and so on)?
In: Technology
Imagine memory and storage to be a collection of identical looking boxes that can only be identified by a number written on it. The content of the boxes are the things (data) that you store.
If you use only single digit numbers, the most number of boxes uniquely identified is 10 – ie from 0 to 9. If you use two digit numbers, then you can identify 100 boxes ie 00 to 99. Because we use decimal (base 10) numbers the number increases as 10, 100, 1000 which is 10^1, 10^2, 10^3 where 1,2 and 3 are the number of digits used.
Computers use binary numbers which has only two digits 0 and 1. This means as the number of digits used to identify boxes increases, the number of different boxes identified increases by 2^1, 2^2, 2^3, 2^4 which is 2, 4, 8, 16 and so on.
Computers use binary numbers because that is easy to implement in electronics where 0 is “off” and 1 is “on”.
Latest Answers