BetterMac bmtop Apple Silicon telemetry guide
On supported Apple Silicon Macs, bmtop reads SoC, temperature, and fan data from system interfaces and clearly omits unavailable capabilities.
What you can inspect
bmtop can show E/P cluster frequency and residency, CPU/GPU/ANE/DRAM power, whole-system wall power, temperatures, fans, and thermal pressure.
- GPU utilization, frequency, power, and theoretical peak TFLOPS
- Per-process CPU/GPU use and Energy Impact
- Capability probes determine which fields are available
Permissions and enhanced samples
Routine collection needs no administrator access, daemon, or root TUI. Only an explicit enhanced GPU or sensors sample invokes one constrained powermetrics sudo flow.
bmtop gpu --enhanced
bmtop sensors --enhancedMeasurement boundaries
Estimated per-process watts allocate measured package power by process share; they are not direct per-process measurements.
On Intel Macs, without IOReport, or when the kernel lacks counters, the corresponding SoC, DRAM, or ANE fields are omitted and other panels keep working.