You can find out a lot about a company, its product roadmap and the things that they are interested in by looking at the patents that they file. Case in point, the Macintosh News Network recently posted about an interesting find while it perused the US Patent & Trademark Office publications. According to the Macintosh News Network, the US Patent & Trademark Office published two patent applications that were both You can find out a lot about a company, its product roadmap and the things that they are interested in by looking at the patents that they file. Case in point, the Macintosh News Network recently posted about an interesting find while it perused the US Patent & Trademark Office publications.According to the Macintosh News Network, the US Patent & Trademark Office published two patent applications that were both filed back in July 2006 and titled “Virtualization of graphics resources”. The site stated that the patents generally relate to computer graphics, and more particularly to virtualizing resources for computer graphics. In many instances, the patent points to OpenGL and graphics address re-mapping table (GART) entries. The article does state that Apple isn’t listed as the official assignee but that this is common practice today. The patent does however list Ken Dykes by name, and he was listed on a previous Apple patent for an iPod harness. Patent Background A graphics kernel driver typically interfaces between graphics client drivers and graphics hardware to assign graphics resources to each client driver and to administer the submission of graphics commands to the graphics hardware. Each client driver has explicit knowledge of the graphics resources it is assigned and references the resources in its commands using the physical address of the resources. As more sophisticated graphics features are developed, the demand for graphics resources is ever increasing but the graphics resources are limited by the graphics hardware and other system constraints. The assigned resources cannot be shared among clients because the graphics hardware is not designed to handle resource contention among the clients. Additionally, the client drivers are required to manage their own internal resource conflicts. For example, they must handle their attempts to use more than available graphics memory. Is Apple looking to the virtualization of graphics resources? Read the entire post and judge for yourself. It does sound interesting. Software Development