Not necessarily. A code profiler may have some use in a complex design where the designer has not much idea on how the system works and/or there is interaction from multiple activities running asynchronous to each other on the same processor.

I would submit that for must smaller MCU systems the designer of a system will already be painfully aware of where the bottlenecks in their system design are. And if it comes down to trying to measure how long activities on the MCU take in real time it is far far easier to use an oscilloscope to measure pulses placed onto a spare port pin or two by specially added SETB and CLR instructions in the code at key places.

Michael Karas