Appeal No. 2004-0412
Application No. 09/052,358
Chen discloses simulation techniques for cache performance
analysis wherein simulations by space sampling and,
alternatively, time sampling, are used to reduce the space and
time requirements for simulating large caches (abstract). Chen
discloses (page 55, first paragraph):
Since trace simulation is generally time-consuming, we
may avoid the long simulation process by using trace-
sampling techniques. The key idea is to observe only a
small portion of the cache simulation and make the
performance measurement from a collection of these
observations (also called samples). As shown in
Figure 1, the sampling techniques may be applied in
either time domain or space domain, or combined both.
By time sampling, the cache performance is observed
only in several time-contiguous trace intervals and the
rest portions of the trace stream are ignored. By
space sampling, the performance is observed for
references accessing portion of overall cache sets.
Chen’s figure 1 has space domain on the vertical axis and time
domain on the horizontal axis. The figure shows two spaced-apart
regions of the space domain, each intersecting two spaced-apart
regions of the time domain.
The examiner has reproduced Chen’s figure 1 on page 5 of the
examiner’s answer, and has labeled as “Ref 1" the intersection of
the first time domain region and the upper space domain region,
and labeled as “Ref 2" the intersection of the second time domain
region and the lower space domain region. The examiner argues
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