A method for analyzing a set of spawning pairs, where each spawning pair identifies at least one speculative thread. The analysis may be practiced via software in a compiler, binary optimizer, standalone modeler, or the like. The analysis may include determining a predicted execution time for a sequence of program instructions, given the set of spawning pairs, for a target processor having a known number of thread units, where the target processor supports speculative multithreading. The method is further to select a spawning pair, according to a greedy approach, if the spawning pair provides a performance enhancement, in terms of decreased execution time due to increased parallelism, when the speculative thread is spawned during execution of a code sequence. Other embodiments are also described and claimed.