@aras@pervognsen@mjp for OoO CPU you mainly look at critical path length and throughput limits without regards to specific instruction schedule, which is way easier compared to in-order. It's not like you can add up instruction latencies for a pipelined in-order core to get a good estimate. @rygorous tweeted about this too iirc.
(I don't suppose there's an implied ";)" after your "?")