Awesome

Sudoless utility to profile average frequency, voltage, residency, and more on Apple Silicon!

• Table of contents
  • Project Deets
  • Example Output
  • Features
  • Future Stuff
  • Installation, Usage, and Making
    • Install using Homebrew
    • Install manually
    • Building yourself
  • Outside Influence
  • Compatibility Notes
  • Contribution

Project Deets

This tool samples counter values from the IOReport and returns formatted results for various metrics. It's written in Objective-C because NS types made things easier, but it's starting to get all mixed around and junk from a bunch of half-refactoring...At least it's getting more effecient over time or something? Idk. Activity on this project is kind of random. Ive got other things in life to do so fixes may be a bit slow.

It is based on reverse engineering powermetrics, and reports pretty much every statistic offered by powermetrics -s cpu_power,gpu_power, plus some extras here and there (see full metric list and example output)... but it doesn't need sudo to run. Because, uh, needing to be system admin in order to monitor Apple Silicon frequencies is dumb (yeah, I'm looking at you, powermetrics). So here you go! No administrative privileges needed! Yaaay.

Example Output

Note: The following is a complete output of socpwrbud -a running on a M2 Pro 16" Macbook Pro.

Profiling Apple M3 Pro (T6030)...

Integrated Graphics 
    Average frequency: 609 mhz
    Average voltage:   692 mv
    Active residency:  2.46 %
    Idle residency:    97.54 %

    DVFS distribution:
        338 MHz (655 mv): 46.49%
        796 MHz (715 mv): 33.53%
        924 MHz (740 mv): 19.98%

6-Core ECPU
    Average frequency: 2079 mhz
    Average voltage:   957 mv
    Active residency:  28.44 %
    Idle residency:    71.56 %

    DVFS distribution:
        744 MHz (790 mv): 33.40%
        2748 MHz (1040 mv): 66.60%

    Core #0
        Average frequency: 2110 mhz
        Average voltage:   960 mv
        Active residency:  19.12 %
        Idle residency:    80.88 %

        DVFS distribution:
            744 MHz (790 mv): 31.84%
            2748 MHz (1040 mv): 68.16%

    Core #1
        Average frequency: 2171 mhz
        Average voltage:   968 mv
        Active residency:  9.73 %
        Idle residency:    90.27 %

        DVFS distribution:
            744 MHz (790 mv): 28.79%
            2748 MHz (1040 mv): 71.21%

    Core #2
        Average frequency: 1808 mhz
        Average voltage:   923 mv
        Active residency:  8.90 %
        Idle residency:    91.10 %

        DVFS distribution:
            744 MHz (790 mv): 46.89%
            2748 MHz (1040 mv): 53.11%

    Core #3
        Average frequency: 1920 mhz
        Average voltage:   937 mv
        Active residency:  2.83 %
        Idle residency:    97.17 %

        DVFS distribution:
            744 MHz (790 mv): 41.30%
            2748 MHz (1040 mv): 58.70%

    Core #4
        Average frequency: 2038 mhz
        Average voltage:   951 mv
        Active residency:  2.01 %
        Idle residency:    97.99 %

        DVFS distribution:
            744 MHz (790 mv): 35.43%
            2748 MHz (1040 mv): 64.57%

    Core #5
        Average frequency: 2061 mhz
        Average voltage:   954 mv
        Active residency:  1.13 %
        Idle residency:    98.87 %

        DVFS distribution:
            744 MHz (790 mv): 34.27%
            2748 MHz (1040 mv): 65.73%

6-Core PCPU
    Average frequency: 2057 mhz
    Average voltage:   897 mv
    Active residency:  12.09 %
    Idle residency:    87.91 %

    DVFS distribution:
        696 MHz (790 mv): 42.27%
        2424 MHz (890 mv): 1.65%
        2988 MHz (960 mv): 49.49%
        3420 MHz (1090 mv): 3.64%
        4056 MHz (1150 mv): 2.94%

    Core #0
        Average frequency: 2033 mhz
        Average voltage:   890 mv
        Active residency:  4.61 %
        Idle residency:    95.39 %

        DVFS distribution:
            696 MHz (790 mv): 41.27%
            2424 MHz (890 mv): 2.99%
            2988 MHz (960 mv): 53.91%
            3420 MHz (1090 mv): 1.81%
            4056 MHz (1150 mv): 0.01%

    Core #1
        Average frequency: 1974 mhz
        Average voltage:   889 mv
        Active residency:  7.62 %
        Idle residency:    92.38 %

        DVFS distribution:
            696 MHz (790 mv): 44.88%
            2424 MHz (890 mv): 1.23%
            2988 MHz (960 mv): 49.61%
            3420 MHz (1090 mv): 3.78%
            4056 MHz (1150 mv): 0.50%

    Core #2
        Average frequency: 3122 mhz
        Average voltage:   1031 mv
        Active residency:  0.20 %
        Idle residency:    99.80 %

        DVFS distribution:
            696 MHz (790 mv): 5.59%
            2424 MHz (890 mv): 1.67%
            2988 MHz (960 mv): 30.18%
            3420 MHz (1090 mv): 62.37%
            4056 MHz (1150 mv): 0.19%

    Core #3
        Average frequency: 4006 mhz
        Average voltage:   1141 mv
        Active residency:  0.35 %
        Idle residency:    99.65 %

        DVFS distribution:
            2988 MHz (960 mv): 4.69%
            4056 MHz (1150 mv): 95.31%

    Core #4
        Average frequency: 0 mhz
        Average voltage:   0 mv
        Active residency:  0.00 %
        Idle residency:    100.00 %

        DVFS distribution:

    Core #5
        Average frequency: 3228 mhz
        Average voltage:   1032 mv
        Active residency:  0.04 %
        Idle residency:    99.96 %

        DVFS distribution:
            2988 MHz (960 mv): 44.42%
            3420 MHz (1090 mv): 55.58%

Features

The following metrics are available sampled unit per-cluster:

• Active and Idle Residencies
• Active Frequencies and Voltage
• DVFS Distribution
• Power Consumption (missing for now)
• Micro architecture names (missing for now)

Per-core metrics of the same are available for the CPUs.

I would love to support ANE stuff, there are remnants in powermetrics for gettig that data, but no real keys in IOReport for them.

Future Stuff

• I need to set back up homebrew
• I need to add power consumption metrics again
• I would like to report microarchs

Installation, Usage, and Making

Note: Tool usage is listed by socpwrbud -h, or --help if you're a verbose kinda person.

Install using Homebrew

Let me get back to you on that.

Install manually

1. Download the bin from latest release.
2. Unzip the downloaded file into your desired dir (such as /usr/bin)
3. Run socpwrbud! (still, dont ask why "power" is shortened for the binary name)

Building yourself

Xcode proj is in source but you can build with make if you so desire...

Outside Influence

This project managed to reach influence into the IOReport related metric gathering on NeoAsitop.

Compatibility Notes

I'll try to get a better up to date table here some day in time, maybe. Apple breaks stuff a lot so I can't confirm anything. M1, M2, M3, M3 pro should work fine at least. It's usually Max and Ultras that have problem, or at least a chip with more than 1 cluster per CPU type in it.

Contribution

If any bugs or issues are found, please let me know in the issues section. If the problem is related to missing IOReport entries, please share the output of the iorepdump tool found in the latest release. Feel free to open a PR if you know what you're doing :smile: