Appeal No. 1997-0760
Application No. 08/003,000
is no claimed 'independent nature' [of the threads]" as
argued. We disagree with the examiner.
Appellants clearly define "thread" in the specification
(page 4, lines 1-3) as "a part of a program that is logically
independent from another part of the program and can therefore
be executed in parallel with other threads of the program."
(Emphasis added). On page 38 of the article provided by
appellants entitled "MULTITHREADED Processor Architectures"
(Brief, Appendix 3), reference is made to "multiple concurrent
streams of execution, or threads, which are independent of one
another." (Emphasis added). On page 40 of the same article,
"thread" is defined as "a statically ordered sequence of
instructions. Multiple threads may operate concurrently
within a task or process, each with its own program counter
and local state but with some state shared by all the threads
in the process." (Emphasis added). Although the article was
published in 1995, six years after the effective filing date
of appellants' application, page 38 explains that
"[e]xperimental multithreaded systems have existed since the
1950's" and [t]he first commercial multithreaded system was
the Heterogeneous Element Processor (HEP), introduced in
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