Appeal No. 97-0784
Application 08/174,648
Appellants argue (Br5-6), and the Examiner admits (EA6),
that neither Stamm nor Takahashi discloses that "the step of
resending is performed only after ensuring that the conditions
under which the original request was generated still dictate
that the request should be performed," as recited in claim 9,
or that "the second device resends the request packet only if
the conditions requiring the operation are still valid," as
recited in claim 9.
The Examiner reasons as follows (EA6):
Clearly, if the data at the memory location is no longer
needed, it would make no sense, in fact it would waste
valuable processing time, bus bandwidth and memory
bandwidth for the processor to resend the request for
data that is not needed by a process. If the data is
needed by the processor, it would be necessary for the
processor to resend the request packet for the stalled
memory request. It would have been obvious, therefore,
to resend the request packet to the responding memory
device only if the data at the memory location is still
required, since requiring the system to operate any other
way would result in an extremely inefficient or possibly
inoperative system.
Appellants argue (Br6): "Because the Examiner could not find
any suggestion in the prior art, the rejection of the present
invention on obviousness has been improperly based on
hindsight."
- 4 -
Page: Previous 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 Next
Last modified: November 3, 2007