Appeal No. 1999-0288
Application No. 08/538,071 Page 6
this deficiency in Wibecan, the examiner turns to Brantley for a
teaching of monitoring events including the number of times a
specific address is accessed. The examiner asserts (final
rejection, page 3) that it would have been obvious to allow
Wibecan's system to control the counting of events such as
specific address references, as taught by Brantley because it
would allow Wibecan's system to measure the performance of
accesses to specific addresses, which will give a user a chance
to adjust any parameters or configurations of the system in order
to receive better performance from the data processing system.
The examiner further asserts (final rejection, page 4) that
Wibecan does not show the use of the performance monitor bit
being located in a machine state register. The examiner takes
the position (final rejection, page 4) that “it would have been
obvious to one of ordinary skill in the art to realize that the
enablement of a processing system to recognize which mode or
process it is operating in, such as user or supervisor mode, are
usually located in a register which is accessible to the
processing systems other elements. This ensures that certain
processes can not be executed while in certain modes” and that
(pages 4 and 5) “it would have found it obvious to place the
process recognition bit (flags etc.) in a state register which
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