Appeal No. 2003-0333
Application No. 09/231,041
that the teachings in Menasce can be extended to arrive at the
claimed invention. Appellant also responds that Smith relates
only to dividing a cumulative cache memory into a plurality of
partitions and not to a memory space division as claimed [reply
brief, pages 3-8].
We will not sustain the examiner’s rejection of claim 1
based on this record. With respect to the question of whether
the branches in Menasce are separate and independent, we are not
persuaded by appellant’s arguments that these branches are
interdependent as argued by appellant. Although Menasce states
that the CMMUs are interleaved rather than the data or code
words, we understand from the drawings that it is the access of
the CMMUs that is interleaved rather than the CMMUs per se. In
other words, the data storage and retrieval within each branch
appears to be separate and independent to us. Nevertheless, we
agree with appellant that neither Menasce nor Smith teaches the
claim recitation of at least one branch having at least one
hierarchical level of multiple cache memory units in a memory
space division. The examiner’s position that Menasce can be
extended to arrive at the claimed invention is unsupported by
Menasce. Although Menasce teaches that bandwidth is improved by
going from the structure of Figure 1 to the structure of Figure
7
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