ALEXANDRIA, Va., March 19 -- United States Patent no. 12,253,921, issued on March 18, was assigned to Huawei Technologies Co. Ltd. (Shenzhen, China).
"CPU-GPU lockstep system" was invented by Da Qi Ren (Saratoga, Calif.) and Liang Peng (Los Gatos, Calif.).
According to the abstract* released by the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office: "A lockstep controller operates a lockstep system of three or more CPU-GPU pairs, comparing the outputs from the CPU-GPU pairs and, by way of a majority vote, provides the output for the lockstep system. Based on comparing the outputs, if one of the CPU-GPU pairs provides outputs that disagree with the majority outputs, it can be switched out of the lockstep system. The removed CPU is replaced by a backup CPU. So...