[Dylan16807]

> This thread is full of people who challenged themselves to solve it and then failed to come up with the 'obvious' 1-cycle solution. It's clearly non-obvious, as this thread shows.

If a significant fraction of people come up with it on the spot, it's obvious. And they did.

[bsdetector]

I don't even see a single comment mentioning doing this in 1 cycle except from those who read the patent, much less reusing existing functional units to do so, so it's not clear to me any commenter came up with an equivalent to the patented solution or even identified the problem solved by it.

Keep in mind this solution was to support MPEG-1 video encoding in the olden days when state of the art processors were 100 MHz and 800 nm process. Doing this in 1 cycle while reusing already existing function units seems like a clever solution to me -- not patent-worthy, not difficult, but clever.

[Dylan16807]

Are you very sure that patent would never get threatened toward a software implementation that doesn't know anything about cycles?

If so then the technique in the post isn't actually patented.

If that C code would get threatened, then the 1 cycle thing is a red herring.

Also "Doing this in 1 cycle while reusing already existing function units"? In hardware you can use a normal adder without any special technique...

[bsdetector]

I've already said twice now that it's not patent-worthy, so it seems we're in agreement on that point.

[Dylan16807]

That's a response to you calling it clever.