According to the analysis, certain instructions are taking tons of cycles to execute so I assume this means I have pipeline stalls somewhere. But how do I tell _why_ these instructions (which normally should execute pretty fast) are taking so long? I've tried re-ordering them and it doesn't seem to be making much of a difference.
The usual answer is to investigate events (various categories of cache misses, resource allocation stalls, ....) to see if this answers your "why." As you may have figured out, non-precise event cycle counts tend to pile up on instructions which are waiting for some previous stall to be resolved.
Many types of instruction re-ordering are done at least as effectively by out-of-order hardware execution, so it's not surprising that re-ordering makes little difference, unless you are are running on Atom, where it might well help.
