cpuinfo For Mac

Keeping a close eye on your Mac’s CPU usage can prove to be a very good idea: you can avoid putting too much of a strain on your computer, while making sure that you have enough processing power to launch high maintenance tasks.

cpuinfo (formerly Cpumeter) is a minimalist application that places a small menulet on your status bar and allows you to view your CPU usage without having to run the Activity Monitor app, which needs a fair amount of resource on its own.

Since cpuinfo resides in the status bar, you get the information that you need at a glance, while not having to interact with the application. However, cpuinfo does include a couple of customization options that you might find useful.

First of all, you get to adjust the data refresh interval, which can go between 0.1 and 1.0 seconds. You can also choose to add the app to the list of login items, which means that it will be always present in your status bar.

You get to change the way in which the information is presented. In image view, the app uses a slidebar animation to depict the CPU usage, while in text mode the same data in displayed in percentages, which is certainly more accurate.

cpuinfo does not provide information about the load of each core, but displays the total CPU load for the host. This means that the applications gathers information both about the system and the user CPU usage, and displays a rounded value, which is a lot easier to read by the user.

To conclude, if you want to monitor only the CPU load without having to use the default Activity Monitor tool, cpuinfo certainly gets the job done.