Why does digital storage always have the same values eg. 32gb, 64gb, 128gb, 256gb etc. and why do they double every time they go up in size? Is this a limitation or just a standard?
In: Technology
In addition to all the other answers I’d just like to point out that this is not always the case. For example in graphics cards it’s quite common to see 3 or 6GiB or 12GiB of VRAM capacity. In this case it’s because some GPUs have a 192 bit memory bus (it’s a half-way step between 128bit and 256bit) and use (usually) one memory chip for each 32bit slice. So you end up with 6*32bit memory chips. You can then pick e.g. 512MiB or 1GiB sizes for each chip, ending up at 3 or 6GiB respectively.
GPUs in general have quite interesting interface widths: 64, 128, 192, 256, 320, 384 bit are all common. Combine this with the fact that most memory chips have a 32bit interface and you end up with total memory capacities like 12GiB (192bit/32bit*2GiB) or 10GiB (320bit/32bit*1GiB). Interface width is also the main reason why high end models usually have more VRAM and higher bandwidth. They just use more memory chips in parallel. But it is more expensive to do so.
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