asitop: monitor your Apple Silicon SoC, power consumption included

How low is it?

When you want to monitor a UNIX system, top is a good command to know. It provides information about CPU, RAM, processes, 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, your main concern isn’t to use a cross-platform tool. You want “close to metal” data. One of the best-known examples 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 information about Apple Silicon SoCs in a graphical (CLI) way: how they’re composed, Efficient/Performance CPU cores and GPU usage, their frequency. It installs via pip or HomeBrew and needs sudo rights:

brew install asitop || pip install asitop
sudo asitop

You also get information 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’ll be notified.

Finally, two things are missing: temperature and fan speed. Let’s hope it’s planned for a future release.