Appeal No. 2003-0186
Application No. 09/033,529
higher priority (expedite) access to the computer memory than other devices in
the computer. Other devices are given a lower priority (non-expedite) access to
the computer memory. To prevent expedite device requests from starving out
the requests from non-expedite devices, the expedite requests are throttled, see
appellants’ specification page 5. The step of throttling includes monitoring
requests made to the system memory during a monitoring window, see page 7 of
appellants’ specification. Two counters are used in monitoring the requests for
system memory, the first counter monitors the monitoring window period cycles
and the second counter monitors the non-expedite period cycles, see pages 9
and 11 of appellants’ specification and figure 2c. The counters are compared
and if they are equal, the expedite status of requests is masked, appellants’
figure 3 is a flow chart of this process. Thus, expedite requests are lowered to
allow other devices to compete for access to system memory, see page 11 of
appellants’ specification.
Claim 1 is representative of the invention and is reproduced below
1. A method comprising:
monitoring expedite and non-expedite requests in a
monitoring window having a predetermined duration to determine a
number of clock cycles for the expedite and non-expedite requests,
the number of cycles for the non-expedite requests being
monitored by a non-expedite counter;
2
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