Byte codified this common meaning. Many types of applications use information representable in eight or fewer bits and processor designers optimize for this common usage. The popularity of major commercial computing architectures has aided in the ubiquitous acceptance of the eight-bit size. Modern architectures typically use 32- or 64-bit words, built of four or eight bytes. The unit symbol for the byte was designated as the upper-case letter "B" by the International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC) and Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) in contrast to the bit, whose IEEE symbol is a lower-case "b". Internationally, the unit "octet", symbol "o",
Stochastic computing Stochastic computing Stochastic computing is a collection of techniques that represent continuous values by streams of random bits. Complex computations can then be computed by simple bit-wise operations on the streams. Stochastic computing is distinct from the study of randomized algorithms. Suppose that formula_1 is given, and we wish to compute formula_2. Stochastic computing performs this operation using probability instead of arithmetic. Specifically, suppose that there are two random, independent bit streams called "stochastic number"s (i.e. Bernoulli processes), where the probability of a one in the first stream is formula_3, and the probability in the second stream is formula_4. We