The patent badge is an abbreviated version of the USPTO patent document. The patent badge does contain a link to the full patent document.
The patent badge is an abbreviated version of the USPTO patent document. The patent badge covers the following: Patent number, Date patent was issued, Date patent was filed, Title of the patent, Applicant, Inventor, Assignee, Attorney firm, Primary examiner, Assistant examiner, CPCs, and Abstract. The patent badge does contain a link to the full patent document (in Adobe Acrobat format, aka pdf). To download or print any patent click here.
Patent No.:
Date of Patent:
Nov. 08, 2011
Filed:
Mar. 24, 2008
Brett W. Coon, San Jose, CA (US);
John R. Nickolls, Los Altos, CA (US);
Lars Nyland, Carrboro, NC (US);
Peter C. Mills, San Jose, CA (US);
Brett W. Coon, San Jose, CA (US);
John R. Nickolls, Los Altos, CA (US);
Lars Nyland, Carrboro, NC (US);
Peter C. Mills, San Jose, CA (US);
NVIDIA Corporation, Santa Clara, CA (US);
Abstract
A system and method for locking and unlocking access to a shared memory for atomic operations provides immediate feedback indicating whether or not the lock was successful. Read data is returned to the requestor with the lock status. The lock status may be changed concurrently when locking during a read or unlocking during a write. Therefore, it is not necessary to check the lock status as a separate transaction prior to or during a read-modify-write operation. Additionally, a lock or unlock may be explicitly specified for each atomic memory operation. Therefore, lock operations are not performed for operations that do not modify the contents of a memory location.