Hardware checkpoints may be used to mark software-based speculation regions. An instruction may be provided at the beginning of a speculation region and at the end of the speculation region. If an exception occurs during the speculation region, a hardware rollback may be occurred. The hardware rollback rolls back to the instruction at the beginning of the speculation region. The hardware may take a checkpoint by taking a register snapshot and treating future memory updates as tentative. When the instruction marking the end of the speculation is reached, all the tentative memory updates are committed and the previously taken register snapshot is discarded.