[mhh__]

Callgrind can give you instruction counts yes. It doesn't simulate any microarchitecture other than caches which means its only useful for comparing with itself.

Perf stat is very very high overhead. The perf API is available and can be tuned a bit more nicely but it's mostly a horrible mess. It uses bitfields too which makes it somewhat hard to get to from other languages unless you trust the shifts and masks.