There is provided a method, system and program storage device for utilizing a hardware performance monitors for improving performance of an application comprising a plurality of instructions while the application is executing on a micro-architecture, comprising: creating a machine internal representation (MIR) for the plurality of instructions or a subset thereof for the hardware and generating an executable (EXE) from the MIR for execution on the hardware; determining hardware performance monitor (HPM) information for an event associated with a resource of the hardware during execution of the EXE to identify one or more instructions of the application that affect the execution of the application on the hardware; re-computing the MIR according to the HPM information; and re-generating the EXE from the re-computed MIR for execution on the hardware if the MIR and the re-computed MIR are different, thereby improving utilization of the resource by the application. Also provided is a hardware performance monitor (HPM) subsystem for improving performance of an application comprising a plurality of instructions while the application is executing on a hardware.