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 rough estimate very rapidly. This property is usually referred to as "progressive precision", which suggests that the precision of stochastic numbers (bit streams) increases as computation proceeds. It is as if the most significant bits of the number arrive before its least significant bits; unlike the conventional arithmetic circuits where the most significant bits usually arrive last. In some iterative systems the partial solutions obtained through progressive precision can provide faster feedback than through traditional computing methods, leading to faster convergence. Stochastic computing is, by its very nature, random. When we examine a random bit stream and try to reconstruct