US Patent Issued to Arm on July 1 for "Providing counters in a data processor" (British, Norwegian Inventors)

ALEXANDRIA, Va., July 3 -- United States Patent no. 12,346,255, issued on July 1, was assigned to Arm Ltd. (Cambridge, Great Britain).

"Providing counters in a data processor" was invented by Andreas Due Engh-Halstvedt (Trondheim, Norway) and Philip Michael Watts (Cambridge, Great Britain).

According to the abstract* released by the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office: "A data processor, such as a graphics processor, is disclosed. The data processor includes a set of one or more counters, and a control circuit that maintains a cache-like pool of corresponding entries. In response to a request for a counter, the control circuit may allocate an entry of the cache-like pool to thereby allocate a counter of the set."

The patent was filed on March...