asitop — Apple Silicon Performance Monitor (M5 Max Support)

Performance monitoring CLI tool for Apple Silicon Macs — with Apple M5 support.

This is a maintained fork of tlkh/asitop that fixes the crash on Apple M5, M5 Pro, M5 Max, and M5 Ultra. The upstream repo has been inactive since January 2023 and does not support M5's unified cluster architecture.

What Changed (M5 Fix)

Apple M5 chips use a unified M-cluster architecture instead of the separate E-Cluster/P-Cluster naming used by M1–M4. Upstream asitop crashes immediately on M5 with:

KeyError: 'E0-Cluster_active'

This fork fixes the crash by detecting M-prefixed clusters in the powermetrics output and mapping them correctly to the asitop dashboard. It also adds M5 Max TDP and memory bandwidth values.

Upstream PR: tlkh/asitop#92

Installation

Install from this fork (recommended for M5 Macs):

pip install git+https://github.com/ProducerGuy/asitop.git

Usage

# recommended — enter password before start
sudo asitop

# advanced options
sudo asitop [--interval INTERVAL] [--color COLOR] [--avg AVG]

Flag	Description	Default
--interval	Sampling interval in seconds	1
--color	Display color (0–8)	2
--avg	Averaging window in seconds	30

What It Shows

• CPU utilization — per-cluster frequency and active residency (P-CPU and E-CPU gauges)
• GPU utilization — frequency, active residency percentage
• ANE utilization — estimated from power draw
• Memory — RAM and swap usage
• Power — CPU, GPU, and package power draw with rolling average and peak tracking
• Thermal — throttle status

Supported Hardware

Chip	Status	Notes
Apple M1 / M1 Pro / M1 Max / M1 Ultra	Supported	Original upstream support
Apple M2	Supported	Original upstream support
Apple M3 / M3 Pro / M3 Max / M3 Ultra	Supported	Uses default TDP values
Apple M4 / M4 Pro / M4 Max / M4 Ultra	Supported	Uses default TDP values
Apple M5 / M5 Pro / M5 Max / M5 Ultra	Supported	Fixed in this fork — M-cluster architecture

How It Works

asitop reads hardware performance counters via macOS's built-in powermetrics utility (requires sudo). It also uses psutil for memory/swap and sysctl/system_profiler for CPU and GPU core counts.

Some values (TDP, max bandwidth, ANE max power) are hardcoded estimates per chip model.

License

MIT — see LICENSE.

Credits

Original project by Timothy Liu. M5 support added by ProducerGuy.