Apple Silicon M1 supports “billion of colors” a.k.a. HDR 10-bit output

Re:Apple Silicon M1 supports “billion of colors” a.k.a. HDR ... by SECProto on Friday January 29, 2021 @11:37PM (#25966120)

While we're being pedantic: I agree with you about SI prefixes, but bits are indivisible. A millibit doesnt exist (only possible use would be if one was referring to something like a transfer speed as "19 millibits per second", but that's kind of lacking meaning - "0.019 bit per second" or "1.14 bits per minute" would be better)

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Apple Silicon M1 supports “billion of colors” a.k.a. HDR ... by dkbrk on Friday January 29, 2021 @11:57PM (#25966259)

> bits are indivisible

No, they're not. Sure, in more familiar scenarios where you're measuring the size of some amount of data it's an integer, but there's nothing mathematically wrong with having a not-integer number of bits.

See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shannon_(unit)

If you do any sort of calculations with information theory you're quite likely to end up with a non-integer number of bits, and there's nothing wrong with that.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Apple Silicon M1 supports “billion of colors” a.k.a. HDR ... by reitzensteinm on Saturday January 30, 2021 @01:47AM (#25966860)

You can absolutely have two ranges which require 7.5 bits to store each (0-180) and write them to 15 bits of storage.

Just because physical hardware is more or less restricted to integer bit quantities doesn't mean fractional bits aren't a useful concept.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Apple Silicon M1 supports “billion of colors” a.k.a. HDR ... by SECProto on Saturday January 30, 2021 @02:13AM (#25967001)

Sure, I accept I was wrong, and millibits may have some niche usage. That said, the comment I was responding to was describing hardware with "4 mb" of ram. There's no confusion in that case.

[ Parent | on HN ]