Appeal No. 2001-0048
Application No. 08/497,481
references would still not disclose the claimed sequence of
priority order from the current task to the affinity task.
Accordingly, since the Examiner has failed to establish a prima
facie case of obviousness, the 35 U.S.C. § 103 rejection of
independent claim 1 cannot be sustained.
Turning now to the rejection of claim 3, we note that
Appellants merely repeat the claim language and argue that
Vaswani is silent on the subject of selecting a most favored
thread (brief, page 9). The Examiner responds by questioning the
meaning of a “most favored thread” in claim 3 and pointing to the
alternative format of the claim which, as one of the
alternatives, recites “selecting an affinity thread having the
same priority as the most favored thread” (answer, page 5). The
Examiner further characterizes the high priority threads and
affinity threads of Vaswani as the most favored threads which may
be selected as “a most favored thread (the thread which is
finally selected) among favored threads (from high priority
threads and threads having affinity for the particular
processor)” (id.).
Before addressing the claim rejection based on prior art, as
pointed out by our reviewing court, we must first determine the
scope of the claim. “[T]he name of the game is the claim.” In
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