Appeal No. 1998-1104
Application No. 08/380,985
According to the examiner (Answer, pages 4-5), Dayan
teaches the claimed apparatus and method steps but “does not
teach operating in the system management mode and an
applications program interface (API).” For such teachings,
the examiner turns to Thorson (Answer, page 5). Based upon
the teachings of Thorson, the examiner contends (Answer, page
5) that “[i]t would have been obvious to a person of ordinary
skill in the art at the time the invention was made to operate
Dayan et al’s system in SMM and include API functions to
service the application programs because SMM is designed to
operate in multitasking environments like that of Dayan’s
which utilize both protected and real modes to efficiently
negotiate each mode of operation and APIs provide reliable
interfaces to an application.”
Appellant argues (Brief, pages 4-5) the following:
In particular, as discussed in the
“Background of the Invention,” one of the
principal benefits of SMM is that it
provides a secure memory location for
status and control code; however, the price
of this security is a significant reduction
in efficiency. In some platform designs,
extended applications program interfaces
(APIs), such as Advanced Power Management
(APM), Plug and Play (PnP) and other
machine dependent programs, need to run
with maximum efficiency with respect to
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