When you want to monitor a UNIX system, top is a good command to know. It provides you informations about CPU, RAM, process, storage and network usage, with some interesting details (in a messy way). htop is a more modern and flexible alternative, as are btop, gtop or bottom (previously ytop).
But sometimes, you main concern isn’t to use a cross-platform tool. You want “close to metal” data. One of the best-known example of this is nvidia-smi, familiar to Linux gamers and AI developers.
All you need to know about your Apple SoC
Recently I was looking for something similar for my Apple computers and discovered asitop, an open source Python tool, inspired by nvtop:
It displays informations on Apple Silicon SoC in a graphical (CLI) way: how it’s composed, Efficient/Performance CPU cores and GPU usage, their frequency. It installs via pip or HomeBrew and need sudo rights:
brew install asitop || pip install asitop
sudo asitop
You also get infomations about RAM or Apple Neural Engine (ANE) usage. One of the interesting pieces of information provided is the real-time power usage of the CPU, GPU, ANE and of the whole package. If the chip is throttling (because it’s too hot), you get noticed.
Finally, if two things are missing it’s the temperature and fan speed. Let’s hope it’s planned for a future release.