Byte of the 8080 and the 8086, used in early personal computers, could also perform a small number of operations on the four-bit pairs in a byte, such as the decimal-add-adjust (DAA) instruction. A four-bit quantity is often called a nibble, also "nybble", which is conveniently represented by a single hexadecimal digit. The term "octet" is used to unambiguously specify a size of eight bits. It is used extensively in protocol definitions. Historically, the term "octad" or "octade" was used to denote eight bits as well at least in Western Europe; however, this usage is no longer common. The exact origin
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