> [...] how Perf compares to vendor tools like vTune [...] ?
Regarding the hardware events that Perf can capture on x86, it has pretty much all of them. So it should be equivalent to vTune for all practical purposes.
The big difference is in the UI -- or absence thereof. Perf is a low-level tool and its output is mostly text files. There is a curses-based TUI for perf-report (and even gtk version, but it is essentially the same as the TUI, just using GTK2 widgets), but that's about it.
By contrast, vTune comes with a heavy (electron-based?) GUI and is quite helpful in guiding beginners, with many graphs and explanations.
Of course, one can (and is expected to) complement Perf with an assortment of tools that process its output for visualization. For example, the flamegraph [1] and heat map [2] tools described in the article. But also KDAB hotspot [3] for flame graphs or HPerf [4] for a vTune-style perf-report.
Perf is a great way to generate data for offline analysis. But it lacks a gui, and its text mode interface is very sparse.
The good news is, it is an very solid foundation to build on. They got the fundamentals right.
If you’re profiling short pieces of code PAPI might be better. It lets you bracket code snippets with its function calls and get performance counter data. So you can count instructions, memory accesses etc.
