Perhaps there are two copies of the program pointer, one at the "top of the pipe" updated by instruction decode and branch prediction, and one at the "bottom of

Perhaps there are two copies of the program pointer, one at the "top of the pipe" updated by instruction decode and branch prediction, and one at the "bottom of the pipe" updated by the ROB. Then uops only need to carry the amount by which the program counter is advanced, and certain events can cause a pipeline flush and copy the bottom of pipe version of the counter to the top of the pipe. But that's also all speculation :)