How to See Individual Core CPU Usage on Mac with powermetrics

There are multiple methods to track CPU usage on a Mac, with the most popular being Activity Monitor for the graphical interface and htop or top for command line users. While Activity Monitor can display an optional core graph and htop shows CPU core activity, there's a less familiar command line tool named powermetrics that also provides this data.

If you're an experienced command line user and unfamiliar with powermetrics, you're not alone. I too was unaware of it until I came across an article on eclecticlight.co that mentioned various methods to view CPU core activity, including the 'powermetrics' command line tool. This piqued my interest, and I decided to explore it further. Sharing knowledge is beneficial, so let's delve into how you can utilize this command.

The powermetrics command is compatible with both ARM and Intel Macs, but it offers additional features for Apple Silicon Macs, such as insights into GPU activity and efficiency cores.

Using powermetrics to Monitor Individual CPU Core Activity on Mac

To use powermetrics, you must run it with root privileges, so all commands will start with sudo.

The simplest form of the powermetrics command is as follows, which will provide a continuous stream of data about all power metrics for CPU and GPU on the Mac, including individual core activity:

sudo powermetrics

You can also view a summary of CPU and GPU power usage with: sudo powermetrics --samplers cpu_power,gpu_power --show-usage-summary

What sets powermetrics apart from other well-known tools like htop, top, or even Activity Monitor is its continuous output of new information on new lines, rather than just refreshing CPU core activity on a single screen. This can make powermetrics somewhat overwhelming, and it might consume significant memory if left running for a long time. There are several ways to manage this, such as, as suggested by EclecticLight, directing the output to a text file for later analysis. An example command is:

sudo powermetrics -i 100 -o powermetrics.txt -n 10 -s cpu_power

This command generates a text file called 'powermetrics' with the last 10 entries related to cpu_power (which details Core activity) sampled every 100ms.

Thanks to eclecticlight.co for highlighting this intriguing new command line tool!

Personally, I frequently use htop and/or Activity Monitor. I keep the latter open constantly with the Dock CPU Monitor enabled, and it's easily accessible via a keyboard shortcut for quick launches when needed. When working at the command line, I often have htop running in another Terminal window.

The above is the detailed content of How to See Individual Core CPU Usage on Mac with powermetrics. For more information, please follow other related articles on the PHP Chinese website!