SoC Power Buddy

A sudoless command-line tool to get per-core active frequencies, residency, power, and more (for Apple Silicon CPUs and GPUs).

• Table of contents
  • Project Deets
    • Wat it do?
    • Why it do?
    • Example Output
  • Features
  • Installation, Usage, and Making
    • Install using Homebrew
    • Install manually
    • Building yourself
  • Outside Influence
  • Compatibility Notes
  • Contribution

📰 News!

I just started a new project, Frequency Stats, which is a menubar app that provides CPU and GPU frequency metrics without needing to install a dameon or a kext. It was inspired by this tool, check it out if you want something more convenient for frequency monitoring! New features to come!

Project Deets

Wat it do

SocPowerBuddy samples counter values from the IOReport (across a sampling interval) and returns accurate averages of the related metric.

It is based on reverse engineering powermetrics, and reports every statistic offered by powermetrics -s cpu_power,gpu_power (see full metric list and example output), yet without needing sudo. Note that some metrics and features are exclusive to this project, those of which you will not find in powermetrics.

Officially tested on M1, as well as M1 Pro, Max, and Ultra (see compatibility notes)

Why it do

Because 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!

Example Output

Note: The following is a single output from the project on a Macmini9,1.

Apple M1 T8103 (Sample 1):

	4-Core Icestorm ECPU:

		Supposed Cycles Spent:  59481201
		Instructions Retired:   5.64512e+07
		Instructions Per-Clock: 0.94906

		Power Consumption: 14.55 mW
		Active Frequency:  983.11 MHz

		Active Residency:  14.00%
		Idle Residency:    86.00%
		Dvfm Distribution: (972 MHz: 98.98% [272ms]   2064 MHz: 1.02% [3ms])  

		Core 0:
			Power Consumption: 3.64 mW
			Active Frequency:  981.60 MHz
			Active Residency:  10.10%
			Idle Residency:    89.90%
			Dvfm Distribution: (972 MHz: 99.12% [273ms]   2064 MHz: 0.88% [2ms])  
		Core 1:
			Power Consumption: 3.64 mW
			Active Frequency:  986.19 MHz
			Active Residency:  4.49%
			Idle Residency:    95.51%
			Dvfm Distribution: (972 MHz: 98.70% [271ms]   2064 MHz: 1.30% [4ms])  
		Core 2:
			Power Consumption: 0 mW
			Active Frequency:  983.45 MHz
			Active Residency:  2.13%
			Idle Residency:    97.87%
			Dvfm Distribution: (972 MHz: 98.95% [272ms]   2064 MHz: 1.05% [3ms])  
		Core 3:
			Power Consumption: 3.64 mW
			Active Frequency:  978.33 MHz
			Active Residency:  2.70%
			Idle Residency:    97.30%
			Dvfm Distribution: (972 MHz: 99.42% [273ms]   2064 MHz: 0.58% [2ms])  

	4-Core Firestorm PCPU:

		Supposed Cycles Spent:  313447262
		Instructions Retired:   8.14210e+08
		Instructions Per-Clock: 2.59760

		Power Consumption: 723.64 mW
		Active Frequency:  3191.44 MHz

		Active Residency:  29.01%
		Idle Residency:    70.99%
		Dvfm Distribution: (600 MHz: 0.36% [1ms]   1500 MHz: 0.03% [0ms]   1956 MHz: 0.21% [1ms]   3204 MHz: 99.40% [273ms])  

		Core 4:
			Power Consumption: 530.91 mW
			Active Frequency:  3194.33 MHz
			Active Residency:  28.95%
			Idle Residency:    71.05%
			Dvfm Distribution: (600 MHz: 0.28% [1ms]   1500 MHz: 0.03% [0ms]   1956 MHz: 0.16% [0ms]   3204 MHz: 99.54% [274ms])  
		Core 5:
			Power Consumption: 14.55 mW
			Active Frequency:  3103.99 MHz
			Active Residency:  0.90%
			Idle Residency:    99.10%
			Dvfm Distribution: (600 MHz: 2.78% [8ms]   1956 MHz: 2.22% [6ms]   3204 MHz: 95.00% [261ms])  
		Core 6:
			Power Consumption: 0 mW
			Active Frequency:  0 MHz
			Active Residency:  0%
			Idle Residency:    100%
			Dvfm Distribution: None
		Core 7:
			Power Consumption: 0 mW
			Active Frequency:  0 MHz
			Active Residency:  0%
			Idle Residency:    100%
			Dvfm Distribution: None

	8-Core Integrated Graphics:

		Power Consumption: 0 mW
		Active Frequency:  705.69 MHz

		Active Residency:  1.56%
		Idle Residency:    98.44%
		Dvfm Distribution: (396 MHz: 4.42% [12ms]   720 MHz: 95.58% [263ms])  

Features

The following is sampled per-cluster and is available for all sampled compute units!

• Active and Idle Residencies
• Active Frequencies
• DVFM (Similar to P-State) Distribution and Time Spent
• Power Consumption
• (Static) Silicon IDs

The following is sampled per-cluster but exclusive to the CPU!

• Instructions Retired and Per-cylce
• Supposed CPU Cycles Spent
• (Static) Per-Core metrics
• (Static) Micro architecture names

Installation, Usage, and Making

Note: Tool usage is listed by socpwrbud --help

Install using Homebrew

1. If you dont have Hombrew, install it!
2. Add my tap using brew tap BitesPotatoBacks/tap
3. Install the tool with brew install socpwrbud
4. Run socpwrbud!

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!

Building yourself

The source is bundled in a Xcode project and contains a make file. Simply run make or build via Xcode! The choice is yours.

Outside Influence

This project has recently influenced the CPU/GPU power related metric gathering on NeoAsitop! Yay! Go check it out ❤️

Compatibility Notes

Here's a sick table.

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 😄