Appeal No. 96-2499
Application No. 08/204,521
As argued by appellants, at pages 28 et seq. of the
brief, persuasively, in our view, the flag register of the
instant claimed invention can be partially updated by any
particular instruction. There is no partial updating of the
status/control registers in Cocke, even if we assume,
arguendo, that the status/control registers may be flag
registers.
One might argue that the instant claim language of claim
16, for example, does not require the partial updating relied
on by appellants. However, while the claim does not
specifically recite a “partial updating,” it is clear from the
instant specification and the instant claim language that such
partial updating is made possible by the claimed memory array
which renames the flag register information output from each
instruction to a physical register. Since the flag register
may be partially updated, the flag register as output by a
previous instruction may or may not provide the entire set of
source flag information required for a subsequent instruction.
This is the case when the given or subsequent instruction
requires a “superset” of the flags of the flag register that
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