Intel® VTune™ Amplifier XE and Intel® VTune™ Amplifier for Systems Help
A large code working set size or a high degree of branch misprediction can induce instruction delivery stalls at the front-end, such as misses in the L1I. Such stalls are called Instruction Starvation. This metric is the ratio of cycles generated when no instruction was issued by the front-end to all cycles.
A significant number of CPU cycles is spent waiting for code to be delivered due to L1I misses or other problems. Look for ways to reduce the code working set, branch misprediction, and the use of virtual functions.