Patent ID: 8775686

Claim:
A method comprising: (a) receiving an Atomic Metering Command (AMC) from a processor onto a transactional memory, wherein the transactional memory includes a hardware engine and a memory unit; (b) receiving an input value (IV); (c) using a memory address to read a word out of the memory unit, wherein the memory address is included in the AMC, and wherein the word includes a plurality of credit values; (d) storing the plurality of credit values and the IV into a storage device in the hardware engine; (e) selecting a pair of credit values from the plurality of credit values; (f) subtracting the IV from the pair of credit values, thereby generating a pair of decremented credit values; (g) determining if each of the decremented credit values generated in (f) is greater than a threshold value; and (h) determining a meter color based upon the determination in (g) and returning a result value representing the meter color to the processor; wherein (b) through (h) are performed by the hardware engine.