IA frequency: 1655 (1200.2600) MHz, request: 1650 (1300.2600) MHzīut also, as others have said, looking for a single frequency is over simplifying things. So to get your current frequency, this should work: $ /Applications/Intel\ Power\ Gadget/PowerLog -duration 1 -verbose | grep "IA frequency:" | head -1 It seems intended to generate csv files for later analysis, PowerLog.csv by default, but with the -verbose flag you can get the data directly in the shell.
After installing Intel Power Gadget, the tool is at /Applications/Intel Power Gadget/PowerLog. This lets you access all the data in the GUI, but doesn't require you to write your own code. Intel Power Gadget has a rather obscure PowerLog command line utility. You can of course log the spontaneous changes to the thermal throttling of CPU with pmset -g thermlog and then map that to the CPU specifications if you can gather them elsewhere. The boosts when a single core can run over clocked are less likely to be easily measured, but you can measure thermal throttling very simply with the thermal logging of pmset.
Intel power gadget 3.0.7 pro#
With 8 cores on many MacBook Pro and dozens of cores on the iMac Pro - you're boiling a ton of complexity down to one number. Since the code and each core of a CPU can and will change hundreds of times a second based on ephemeral load factors, power optimizations that consider what's visible on the screen, what network data arrives, the idea that a modern CPU even has one "common" clock rate at any one point in time seems to vastly over-simplify reality. CPU interrupts on macOS are shaped in intervals of 150 ms and much of this detail is public from WWDC 2013 and later on power management, App Nap ( Session 209 in particular is both good and approachable) and battery life optimizations on macOS. I have to think this is a bit of an X Y question in that "What are you going to do once you get this number?" and want to answer that directly, but let's dive a bit into what you're trying to measure.