Some thoughts on the latest 148 rejection. The examiner's design is asynchronous, since it does not rely on the cpu clock. So, even if his design was workable, (which I strongly doubt), it does absolutely nothing to improve the microprocessor speed. Note the benefits listed in the patent. While the examiner's design might theoretically improve the speed of the refresh process, actually, I suspect that the examiner's design would have a detrimental effect on the speed of the microprocessor, no improvement of pin count, and cost. Welcome any other thoughts. Opty

Accordingly, it is an object of this invention to provide a microprocessor with a reduced pin count and cost compared to conventional microprocessors.

It is another object of the invention to provide a high performance microprocessor that can be directly connected to DRAMs without sacrificing microprocessor speed.

It is a further object of the invention to provide a high performance microprocessor in which DMA does not require use of the main CPU during DMA requests and responses and which provides very rapid DMA response with predictable response times.