Appeal No. 96-1014
Application 08/032,530
one having ordinary skill in the art of synchronizing
processors to make the task in Kametani a single
instruction.
The examiner's statement that "what is different
between instruction synchronization and task synchronization
is only the label" (EA6) is inaccurate because a task could
be a single instruction or a group of instructions.
Synchronizing the beginning and end of a task does not imply
that instructions within the task are synchronized on an
instruction by instruction basis. Appellant's response to
the statement (RBr4-6) focusses on the single instruction
disclosure of the application, which is not in question.
Appellant also argues that figure 5 of Kametani shows
tasks 11 and 12 beginning at a different time t than
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tasks 9 and 10 which begin at time t , and that "[t]hese
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different starting times for synchronized tasks cannot take
place in the present invention" (RBr6). We disagree with
appellant's interpretation of figure 5. While all tasks in
a group, e.g., group 15, are associated (col. 4, lines 5-8),
they are not all synchronized if the tasks are independent;
i.e., processors a and b are synchronized at time t and
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