For Oracle hardware, default profiling can now be enabled with a new option, "–h on". This option will select counters that measure CPI/IPC and high-latency memory accesses.
Specification of hardware counters has also been simplified. On Solaris, [on|high|low] now selects profiling rates that approximate the rates used for clock profiling. The [on|high|low] options take most of the guesswork out of choosing appropriate overflow periods, greatly reducing the risk of extreme under- and over-sampling. On Linux, the [on|high|low] options are supported for aliased hardware counters, but numeric specifications are required for raw counters.
For detailed information about how to use hardware counter profiling see Chapter 5, Hardware Counter Profiling on a Multithreaded Program, in Oracle Solaris Studio 12.4: Performance Analyzer Tutorials .