Programming program individual hardware CPU performance counters with desired hardware events

Hi, I searched a lot but was not able to find this information. What tool can i use to program individual hardware CPU performance counters with desired hardware events. For eg. say i want to program General Purpose Counter 3 on intel CPU to monitor Retired Instructions. Is this possible using Oprofile or Linux perf? If yes can you point me to the correct documentation or give an example on how to do this. If no is there any other tool available which is capable of going to that granularity. Thanks, UK