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Pre-Grant Publication Number: 20070260907

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Discussion (9)

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Steven Pearson (5 months ago)

Wow, lots of recent comments. Please note that while this is good, this pilot is not set up to forward these comments to the USPTO. According to P2P, only the materials and annotations under the Prior Art section are forwarded to USPTO. If you know matching prior art, please upload it in that area, and add relevance info for the specific related claims of this application.

Steven Pearson (5 months ago)

Doh! When I logged into P2P, it switched me from one application to another. The above is true, but not intended to be posted here.

Todd Gatts (5 months ago)

I think Claim 2 is more wishful thinking than invention. The claim is to update a machine-readable timer in one micro-operation -- and I would go so far as to say such an invention would be a really great thing -- but we are not told how to do that. There should be logic diagrams or circuits showing how a person schooled in the art of setting machine-readable timers would use this invention to update a timer using a single micro-operation.

Saying that single micro-operation would be faster than multiple micro-operations is not an invention. Showing us how to build a single micro-operation timer updater might be.

I don't have any prior art to give you, but the guys that build atomic clocks must have thought about this problem on a far deeper level than I have. The National Institute of Standards and Technology should be able to help.

Manuel Perez (6 months ago)

Claim 1 is too broad and generic; almost any timer performs the steps discosed in claim 1, so they make the subject-matter of claim 1 not new.
The compensation of the elapsed time (claim 3) is essential to solve the problem posed by the invention so it must be added to claim 1.

Steven Pearson (7 months ago)

Upon closer examination it appears to me that the distinction the application draws between its Claim 1 and the prior art (as described even in the application itself) is the use of *an* (a single) instruction to trigger the updating steps. According to the application, this saves time compared to prior art in which multiple instructions are required to effect the timer update. However, the wording of Claim 1 does not specifically require the updating method itself to comprise a single machine instruction. The claim thus appears broader than the description suggests, and as a result, a somewhat bigger target for prior art relevance. For example, a single branch or jump instruction could cause a machine to execute a multi-instruction timer update method (subroutine). Thus, one may not need to find prior art that performs the updating steps all within one machine instruction.

Steven Pearson (7 months ago)

Perhaps this is where Claim 2 is supposed to come in. Its language appears to try to limit the updating to a single instruction; however, I think that may also fail to do so. Claim 2 says that the steps are "performed in response to...only one micro-operation". Extending my argument above concerning Claim 1, I don't think that "performed in response to" clearly enough requires this all to be part of the execution of a single machine instruction, and again propose that the single micro-operation that the update is responsive to might in prior art be a branch or jump instruction. I would find the claim more consistent with its apparent intent if it said something like "wherein the reading, updating, and storing comprise the execution of only one micro-operation".

Steven Pearson (8 months ago)

The independent claims here appear to be very generic in nature; surely existing processors must already perform the steps listed therein when updating clocks/timers. I assume the potential novelty is in the inclusion of a compensating amount in the new timer value calculation, to account for any new delay introduced by the updating operation itself. This is reflected in Claim 3 for example, and those deriving from it, but not in Claim 1. I'm not certain what exactly Claim 2 is after, but it doesn't sound to this relative layman to be necessarily connected to the compensation mechanism and could be existing art as well. Claim 4 also sounds quite generic to me.

Tom Lovett (7 months ago)

The notion of compensating for the elapsed time is included in a more complicated timer update scenario in US6,591,370," Multinode computer system with distributed clock synchronization system"

Steven Pearson (7 months ago)

Indeed, that does look quite relevant for at least Claim 3. Please enter that patent in the Prior Art section for this application.

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