macmon

A terminal dashboard of CPU, GPU and ANE power draw, frequencies and temperatures — with no admin rights.

What it does

macmon reads Apple Silicon’s own power metrics: package, CPU, GPU and Neural Engine wattage, per-cluster frequencies for efficiency and performance cores, memory bandwidth, temperatures and throttling state. It renders them as a live TUI.

The “sudoless” part is the selling point — powermetrics requires root, which makes it awkward to leave running. macmon does not.

macmon
macmon pipe --soc-info      # machine-readable output

Notes

Apple Silicon only; there is nothing equivalent to read on Intel Macs. Useful for exactly the question a laptop inference host raises: how much power a local LLM run actually costs, and whether the machine is thermally throttling during it.

Alternative to

Alternative	Type	Trade-off
`sudo powermetrics`	Built in	Apple’s own, the data source, but needs root
asitop	Open source	A Python TUI over `powermetrics`, same idea, also needs root
Mx Power Gadget	Paid	The graphical version, paid, menu bar resident
Stats	Open source	Menu bar monitoring, less detail on power domains