A method and apparatus are provided for reducing the number of cycles required to checkpoint instructions in a multi-threaded microprocessor that has dispatch group checkpointing. A determination is made in a first stage of a checkpoint pipeline whether checkpointing can occur for a group of instructions. The results of processing the group of instructions flow to a second stage of the checkpoint pipeline regardless of whether the group of instructions is ready to checkpoint. If the group of instructions is ready to checkpoint, the group of instructions is checkpointed in a third stage of the checkpoint pipeline.