Appeal No. 1999-0288
Application No. 08/538,071 Page 8
The examiner asserts (final rejection, page 6) that "Wibecan
does not specifically show determining a logic level for a bit in
a machine state register, and determining the logic levels for a
bit set of a second MMCR." The examiner (id.) once again notes
that Brantley teaches the use of a register which controls the
operation of the counting operations, and argues that “[i]t would
have been obvious to one [of] ordinary skill in the art to
utilize a hardware based register to house the controlling
indicators for the counting operations performed by Wibecan’s
counting functions, because it would allow Wibecan’s system to
have a hardware based performance monitoring option, which would
complement the software based monitoring functions which operate
in a similar manner. This would allow a user to control the
counters using a control register, via setting bits in hardware
register, rather than doing so in a data structure in a software
routine, which gives a user versatility in controlling the
monitoring session.... [o]ne of ordinary skill in the art would
have recognized this relationship and incorporated the varying
ways of controlling the counters in Wibecan’s system in order to
give the system additional versatility in controlling the
counting services provided by the monitoring system. Although
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