If you want to instrument only a handful events, yes. But for microbenchmarks which you can run for many iterations to get min/max/stdev (such as the benchmarks

If you want to instrument only a handful events, yes. But for microbenchmarks which you can run for many iterations to get min/max/stdev (such as the benchmarks in the article) it's much easier. Disabling turbo often is sufficient to lower the variance far enough that old and new code are clearly distinguishable.