a pipelined microprocessor is provided . the pipelined microprocessor includes a writeback stage which signals an event and sends a sequence number of an instruction which had the event . the event may be , for example , a fault , a trap or a branch misprediction . the pipelined microprocessor further includes a decode stage which stores recovering state information for respective instructions and is responsive to the writeback stage signaling the event by using the sequence number to access the stored information to retrieve recovery state information of the instruction which had the event . the recovery state information may include , for example , a pointer to a next linear instruction , a pointer to a branch target instruction , a branch prediction , or an instruction source . event recovery micro - code determines a next instruction to execute using the recovery state information , the next instruction being executed after a machine recovery .