A byte is the smallest unit of storage which can be accessed in a computer's memory- either in RAM or ROM.It also holds exactly 8 bits.But its old view one byte was sufficient to hold one 8 bit character.Modern days especially on .NET or international versions of Win 32, 16 bits is needed.
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In spread spectrum stuff there are 64 or 128 CHIPS per bit.
Spread Spectrum, CDMA and GPS
In standard computing there are now, bits, nibbles, bytes, words, longwords, long-longwords. These consist of 1, 4, 8, 16, 32 and 64 bits respectively.
Byte - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Don't confuse byte or word with codepoints in unicode format, which is what your question implies.
Unicode - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Byte means 8 bits, even when memory accesses align in 128-bit chunks, even for machines that use native 16-bit UNICODE instead of ASCII.
There's probably a handful of PDP-8's still running in the world, but we don't have to worry about building new programming languages for them, so their 12-bit 'bytes' do not bother us.
Cray also experimented with weird byte-sizes. Some Cray machines had minimum sizes of 32-bits. Porting programs to them was very difficult, so I don't know of any more modern architecture which does the same. Byte access is inefficient in many modern architectures but still possible.