Some tools you can do this with: The perf command line utility, the perf_event_open system call, the libpapi high level API, pmc.h on FreeBSD (IIRC). Now, som

Some tools you can do this with: The perf command line utility, the perf_event_open system call, the libpapi high level API, pmc.h on FreeBSD (IIRC). Now, some more clever analysis: These can tell you the why rather than the what, they collect the same information but can present it graphically and compute TMAM statistics for example (Top-down microarchitecture analysis method). vTune, Intel Advior, AMD uProf, and a few others. vTune is the best for x86, but only supports Intel fully.