bi - two

All computers (currently) use numbers and values stored as strings of '1's and '0's.

You simply can not store values in any lower base, programmers often use base 16 HEX and common users use base 10 decimal.

Hex : 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 A B C D E F

Decimal : 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16

where as binary is expressed as (in bytes)

00000001 00000010 00000011 00000100 
00000101 00000110 00000111 00001000 
00001001 00001010 00001011 00001100 
00001101 00001110 00001111 00010000 

Bits

A single bit can be either '0' or '1', it can not be nothing.

'1' is normaly an active bit while '0' is inactive.

When strung together into bytes / nibbles each bits takes the next power of two.

Bits

A single byte is made up of eight bits and can refer to any number between 0 and 255 (so 256 different numbers)

the left most bit in a byte is the least significant bit and if it is '0' then the byte is an even number and if it is a '1' then it is an odd number.

00000000  0
00000001  1
00000010  2
00000011  3
00000100  4
00000101  5
00000110  6
00000111  7
00001000  8
00001001  9
00001010 10
00001011 11
00001100 12 
00001101 13
00001110 14
00001111 15

note the pattern of the least significant bits, each odd number has the last bit as a '1' and all even numbers have a '0'.

Each bit has a power of two

00000001   1
00000010   2
00000100   4
00001000   8
00010000  16
00100000  32
01000000  64
10000000 128

So 01100111 is an odd number made up of the following values

  00000001   1
+ 00000010   2
+ 00000100   4
+ 00100000  32
+ 01000000  64
           --- 
= 01100111 103
           ---

Nibble

A nibble is simply half a byte, four bits.

so the maximum value for a nibble is 16 (0 - 15)

If you only want to store values up to the value of 15 and the adverge computer stores everything in bytes you can just stick two nibbles together to make one byte.

N' bit computer systems

When you hear of a N' bit computers system, "this latest games console is 128bit"

The statment is refering to the CPU bus size, which determines how much information can be processed by the computer in one go.

So an 8bit computer system can only handle single values upto 255 (large numbers/calculation have to be simulated and can slow down the system exponentialy).

As computers have become more powerfull the need to deal with larger numbers has increased, this is especialy true for 3d graphics, where complex calculations with large numbers are necessary to produce realistic game displays.

Larger the CPU bus and internal registers the more quickly this large numbers can be used.

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