I would like to know the second-by-second cpu frequency on my Mac.
I have a feeling it likes to idle at very low clock speeds and then under demand jumps up to a higher clock rate. (I have UI frame rate evidence that suggests this)
My Mac is the 2017 13" MacBook Pro with touchbar.
The following seems to have worked on older Macs:
Detect current CPU Clock Speed Programmatically on OS X? That article was using the the sysctl hw.cpufrequency terminal command.
Other places use (and Mark Setchell mentioned) an intel program (link) to show it, however it seems that program has stopped working for more recent Macs / OS X versions. Link to screencast of Intel program not working.
However, on my machine that command always returns exactly 2900000000. Which is more than a little bit fishy. I've done lots of clock rate stuff on Android and other computers for the past 5 years, and I highly doubt that the clock rate would be perfectly fixed.
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Is Apple just feeding the command 2900000000 for legacy/support reasons?
Does anyone know of a way to find out the actual cpu frequency?
Is the cpu actually just running at exactly 2900000000 all the time?
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I've dug through the all the sysctl options and didn't see anything (sysctl -a). Max and min clock rate were both 2900000000 but again, given the battery performance and frame rate evidence I highly doubt that.