Appeal No. 96-2499
Application No. 08/204,521
the physical register provided that “said logical source
register does not require, as a source of data, a superset of
said set of flag bits updated by said first instruction.”
The examiner’s counter (page 12 of the answer) that it is
“old and well known” that the “status/control registers in any
conventional computer system must have the ability to provide
partial update by given instruction” is unconvincing since the
examiner has offered no evidence of the fact he/she is relying
on. Moreover, there is no evidence in Cocke of any particular
means or method for performing such a partial register update.
Further, the examiner contends that Cocke teaches a comparison
means for “determining if an input tag for a given instruction
is a superset of previous instruction” [answer-page 13] but
the examiner is not very specific as to where such a teaching
can be found in Cocke, pointing, very broadly, to columns “2-
4, column 5...columns 9-15.” Furthermore, the “tags” of Cocke
appear to be no more than register names whereas the flags and
flag registers of the instant claimed invention are control
bits used to indicate the results of certain operations and
processor conditions.
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