Byte addressing 8 bits; in fact, depending on the platform, byte sizes of 1 to 48 bits have been used in the past. Therefore, the term "octet" is used where the context makes byte-length ambiguous. For example, in the 1980s, Honeywell mainframes had 36-bit words, and were byte-addressable in 9-bit bytes, or "nonets", They used 7- or 8-bit character codes, either of which were stored one to each 9-bit byte, making characters individually addressable. To illustrate why byte addressing is useful, consider the IBM 7094, which is word-addressable and has no concept of a byte. It has 36-bit words, and stores its
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