1. A device for providing hardware support for multiplexing of performance counters, comprising: a plurality of performance counters operable to collect one or more counts of one or more selected activities; a plurality of registers operable to store a set of performance counter configurations; and a state machine operable to automatically select a register from the plurality of registers for reconfiguring the one or more performance counters in response to receiving a first signal, the state machine further operable to reconfigure the one or more performance counters based on a configuration specified in the selected register, the state machine further operable to copy data in selected one or more of the plurality of performance counters to a memory location, or from the memory locations to the counters, or both, in response to receiving a second signal.