Of course what really matters is which instructions are dynamically used the most. Can Intel performance counters collect that data? You could modify QEMU TCG mode to collect it fairly easily.
Both static and dynamic histograms can be pretty important, actually. Dynamic ones for performance, static ones -- usually for correctness (imagine developing a tool just like QEMU, which needs to emulate each instruction type).
Performance counters by themselves aren't granular enough for an exact histogram. But you can use them (especially the LBR[1] and the fancy new PT[2]) to reconstruct an approximate control-flow graph, and with a bit of post-processing it's easy to get per-instruction call frequencies.
A long time ago, I wrote a paper on x86 trace compression that needed a dynamic histogram like the one you mentioned. As expected, the CDF rises very very fast [3, Fig. 5] -- you can cover a very large fraction of execution with a very small number of instructions.
