by sho (sho lwlw),sauce [dead link, gelbooru is here]
why there are two storage measurement unit out there, for example, GiB and GB? It is like those American still use alien units to measure thing and mess up the space program to Mars in 1999 while the other part of the world use Metric system.
When I see GiB, I need to pull up a unit converter to see the actual size in GB, because I prefer decimal system.
Short answer: Because 2^10 (1024) is very close to 1000, and it’s more convenient and accurate to measure things in powers of 2 when dealing with computers.
You can either have a 8KiB cache or a 7.8125KB cache, for example.
At one point it was even worse because they were BOTH kilobytes and both written KB, and it was ambiguous which one you were talking about.