Appeal No. 1998-2661
Application 08/633,267
potential use by later instructions prior to the time the
final result from an instruction is placed within a register
file." Kau's assessment of the prior art renders claim 1
obvious over Kau's prior art teachings by itself. This is
essentially what is also stated by appellants' specification
in the first paragraph at the top of page 3.
As to claim 2, the noted lines 29 through 55 of column 2
form a long paragraph which discusses in-part the use of table
lookups and pointer systems in the context of register
renaming systems of the prior art. Additionally, such pointer
arrangements are stated to identify "particular physical
registers which have been assigned to logical registers." The
use of the terminology "logical registers," from an artisan's
perspective, clearly indicates that a virtual register
assignment of the type set forth in independent claim 13 and
dependent claim 3 was contemplated or was known in the art.
Furthermore, as to the details of claim 2, the use of such a
logical register known in the art, as identified by Kau, would
have further indicated to the artisan that consistent with
classical computer architecture definitions of the word
"virtual," in the context of storage systems, this terminology
8
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