A method and apparatus for reducing instruction dependencies in extended SSA form instructions includes examining a first instruction of a worklist. The worklist contains instructions in the extended SSA form that have a source, a previous link and a write mask and further produce an output. The method and apparatus further includes examining at least one second instruction of the worklist, where the at least one second instruction is a source of the first instruction. Lastly, the method and apparatus includes translating the plurality of instructions in the worklist into a second plurality of instructions in the extended SSA form where the second plurality of instructions contains less instruction dependencies such as previous links.