# macOS 27 CPU power side by side: macmon, mactop and plottypus (M5 Pro)

Canonical: https://plottypus.com/data/macos27-cpu-power-side-by-side

Last updated: 2026-09-24

[data](https://plottypus.com/data) · CC BY 4.0 · v1.0

Three simultaneous 1 Hz runs: macmon 0.8.2 and mactop 2.1.5 report 0.0 W CPU in every sample while plottypus 1.0.0 reads 0.18 to 50.5 W.

about

## What this is

CPU power, system power and CPU usage reported by macmon 0.8.2 (macmon pipe), mactop 2.1.5 (mactop --headless) and plottypus 1.0.0 (plottypus --json-stream), run at the same time at a 1 s interval on a MacBook Pro Mac17,8 (Apple M5 Pro) with macOS 27.0 (26A428), without sudo, on 2026-09-24. Three runs: 20 s (macmon and plottypus), 30 s (macmon and plottypus) and 20 s (all three tools). macmon reported cpu\_power 0.0 in 70 of 70 samples and mactop in 20 of 20, with system power between 11.0 and 103.7 W, while plottypus reported 0.18 to 50.46 W from the SMC CPU power rails. One tidy table: run, tool, version, timestamp, cpu\_power\_w, sys\_power\_w, cpu\_usage (0 to 1), plus GPU, ANE and DRAM watts as each tool reported them (plottypus writes null where it has no current reading). Only numeric power and usage fields are kept; process names, users and volume names from the raw captures are not published.

Captured 2026-09-24. Method: macmon 0.8.2 pipe (IOReport Energy Model, per-interval delta); mactop 2.1.5 headless JSON (IOReport Energy Model, per-interval delta); plottypus 1.0.0 --json-stream (SMC CPU power rails on Mac17,8, SMC PSTR system power). Full notes: [README.md](https://plottypus.com/data/macos27-cpu-power-side-by-side/README.md).

Used by: [the macOS 27 post](https://plottypus.com/blog/macos-27-cpu-power-0w), [plottypus vs macmon](https://plottypus.com/vs/macmon), [plottypus vs mactop](https://plottypus.com/vs/mactop).

files

## Files

| File | Rows | Size | SHA-256 |
| --- | --- | --- | --- |
| [samples.csv](https://plottypus.com/data/macos27-cpu-power-side-by-side/samples.csv) One row per tool sample. | 160 | 19.0 KB | `8f7df53f773f8d547ec9a659e730b4332281f4ddc57650c54cc760653e53c4dd` |
| [samples.ndjson](https://plottypus.com/data/macos27-cpu-power-side-by-side/samples.ndjson) The same rows as samples.csv, one JSON object per line. | 160 | 44.2 KB | `b971c63377cf118071b3f918cf77077294ae21b9fa32f03ff54d3fe60db18c8b` |

columns

## Variables

- **`cpu_power_w` (W)**: CPU power as the tool reported it.
- **`sys_power_w` (W)**: Whole-system power as the tool reported it.
- **`cpu_usage` (fraction 0 to 1)**: CPU busy share as the tool reported it, normalised to 0 to 1.
- **`gpu_power_w` (W)**: GPU power as the tool reported it.
- **`ane_power_w` (W)**: Neural Engine power as the tool reported it.
- **`ram_power_w` (W)**: DRAM power as the tool reported it.

licence

## Cite and reuse

Licensed [CC BY 4.0](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/): reuse it anywhere, with credit.

```
Sheth, L. (2026). macOS 27 CPU power side by side: macmon 0.8.2, mactop 2.1.5 and plottypus 1.0.0 (M5 Pro) (Version 1.0) [Data set]. plottypus.com. https://plottypus.com/data/macos27-cpu-power-side-by-side
```