Octet (computing) Octet (computing) The octet is a unit of digital information in computing and telecommunications that consists of eight bits. The term is often used when the term byte might be ambiguous, as the byte has historically been used for storage units of a variety of sizes. The term "octad(e)" for eight bits is no longer common. A variable-length sequence of octets, as in Abstract Syntax Notation One (ASN.1), is referred to as an octet string. The international standard IEC 60027-2, chapter 3.8.2, states that a byte is an octet of bits. However, the unit byte has historically been platform-dependent and
Stochastic computing of generating random biased bit streams. In practice, these streams are generated with pseudo-random number generators. Unfortunately, generating (pseudo-)random bits is fairly costly (compared to the expense of, e.g., a full adder). Therefore, the gate-level advantage of stochastic computing is typically lost. Third, the analysis of stochastic computing assumes that the bit streams are independent (uncorrelated). If this assumption does not hold, stochastic computing can fail dramatically. For instance, if we try to compute formula_19 by multiplying a bit stream for formula_3 by itself, the process fails: since formula_21, the stochastic computation would yield formula_22, which is not generally true