Appeal No. 2005-2273 Page 2
Application No. 10/319,026
I. BACKGROUND
The invention at issue on appeal concerns computer memory for handling vector
data. (Spec. at 1.) Multimedia applications "present a very high level of parallelism by
performing vector-like operations on large data sets." (Id. at 3.) Although architectural
extensions have addressed the computational demands of multimedia programs, opines
the appellant, "the memory bandwidth requirements of these applications have
generally been ignored." (Id.) He adds, "Data caches in current general-purpose
processors are not large enough to hold these vector data sets which tend to pollute the
caches very quickly with unnecessary data and consequently degrade the performance
of other applications running on the processor." (Id.)
Accordingly, the appellant's invention is a vector transfer unit ("VTU") for
transferring sets of vector data into and out of a processor. Such transfers bypass any
data cache used by the processor. (Id. at 4.)
A further understanding of the invention can be achieved by reading the following
claim:
21. A circuit comprising a microprocessor, the microprocessor comprising:
a register file comprising a plurality of registers for storing vector
data;
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