Take a look at the "cmp ebx,eax" on line 24 of the spreadsheet linked from the article. ebx is only ever modified by pure register manipulations. eax was mostly

Take a look at the "cmp ebx,eax" on line 24 of the spreadsheet linked from the article. ebx is only ever modified by pure register manipulations. eax was mostly recently modified by having a register added to it. And yet the cmp instruction is quite expensive - much more so than those that proceed it and which are executed equally frequently. So, somehow the cost of the r8d four instructions early must end up being propagated through the add in the previous instruction and then gets charged to the "innocent bystander" of the compare. Crazy. I would have expected the "add eax,r8d" on line 23 to pay the price.