asitop
A terminal performance monitor for Apple Silicon Macs that tracks CPU, GPU, memory and power use. Runs locally on macOS and uses the MIT license.
asitop is a terminal hardware monitor for Apple Silicon Macs, with separate views of CPU, GPU and Apple Neural Engine activity. Its README targets Apple Silicon on macOS Monterey; hardware-counter availability can differ on newer macOS releases. It runs locally and suits people who want to watch hardware use during demanding workloads, including local AI inference. It's free and open source under the MIT license.
The display separates the CPU's efficiency and performance clusters and reports their utilization and frequency alongside GPU activity. It also shows RAM and swap capacity and usage, so you can check memory pressure while watching processor load. Neural Engine activity is inferred from its power consumption.
CPU and GPU power charts show how consumption changes over time, with peak readings and rolling averages. These give you a way to compare sustained workloads with brief spikes rather than relying on a single reading. The interface takes inspiration from nvtop, but targets Apple's hardware.
Written in Python, asitop draws on macOS's built-in powermetrics utility and has a small performance footprint. Access to those hardware counters requires administrator privileges. Some reference values, including CPU and GPU power limits and maximum Neural Engine power, are hardcoded estimates rather than measurements reported by the system.
