What’s a Nibble in CompSci?

While computer files aren’t on paper and don’t pile up on your desk, they do take up space on your hard drive. There are times when it is important to know the size of a file, folder, software application or drive or storage device, and digital units of measurement are how these measurements are provided. Nibble, also spelled nybble, is one of the digital units of measurement.

Listening to a conversation on the smallest of digital units, one could easily mistake it for a conversation about small quantities of food. The smallest units are a bit, a morsel, and a byte, which is pronounced exactly like bite. The bit is the basic reference and refers to the smallest unit of information that a computer understands. A byte is eight bits. A nibble is four bits and is also called a “half byte,” making a pun on the food-related usage of nibble meaning “a very small amount of food” and bite meaning “a morsel of food.”

The byte, also equal to two nibbles, is the unit upon which the most familiar of the larger units is based. There are also bit-based units. A kilobit is 1024 bits or 256 nibbles, while a kilobyte is 1024 bytes or 2048 nibbles. A megabit is 1024 kilobits or 262144 nibbles, while a megabyte is 1024 kilobytes or 2097152 nibbles. Seen from the perspective of a nibble, a nibble equals ½ byte 4/1024 kilobit, 1/2048 kilobyte, 4/1048576 megabit, or 1/2097152 megabyte.

A nibble may also be called a “four-bit byte” or a “quartet”. There are 16 possible values ​​for this measurement, but there is no standard abbreviation. The term nibble is also used in sentence nibble mode memory. Nibble-mode memory refers to a specific type of RAM for which the output is a nibble, or four consecutive bits, simultaneously.

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