Appeal No. 96-2499
Application No. 08/204,521
Claims 5 through 7, 11 through 14, 18 through 21, 24
through 27, 43 and 50 will stand with the claims from which
they depend. Accordingly, we also reverse the rejection of
these claims under 35 U.S.C. § 103 as unpatentable over Cocke.
We turn to claims 28, 29, 32, 33, 36, 37 and 44. These
claims recite both static and dynamic flag masks wherein both
masks are used for updating flag bits when an instruction
retires. We find absolutely no teaching or suggestion of the
subject matter of these claims in Cocke. Apparently, neither
does the examiner because, while admitting that Cocke fails to
show the use of a static or dynamic flag (answer-page 10), the
examiner finds that it would have been obvious to “implement a
status/control register renaming system with static and
dynamic flag masks...since [the reference] suggested that the
register renaming can be applied to any type of
registers...use of the static and dynamic flags is not a
patentable distinction, but rather an engineering choice.”
Clearly, the examiner has no basis for calling the static
and dynamic flag masks “an engineering choice” since these
masks are recited as having very specific functions and the
examiner has pointed to nothing in the prior art exhibiting
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