January 10, 2026
Counting drama on a Mac near you
CPU Counters on Apple Silicon: article + tool
New Mac tool chases every CPU stat while devs argue if Apple will kill the fun
TLDR: A new tool claims to read nearly all performance counters on Apple Silicon, going beyond Apple’s limited Instruments. The community is split: enthusiasts love the deeper visibility, skeptics warn private APIs will break, and minimalists say fewer counters are better—sparking jokes, forks, and fiery debates.
A brave dev built a tool that tries to read every performance counter on Apple Silicon—those tiny scorekeepers inside your Mac’s chip that track things like instructions and cache misses. Apple’s own Instruments caps you at around 8–10, with two “fixed” favorites (cycles and instructions), and the community is buzzing: half cheering, half clutching pearls. Fans are thrilled: “Finally, real visibility!” Skeptics say the tool leans on Apple’s private kperf framework—translation: Apple can change it anytime—and warn it’s a brittle science experiment. The backstory adds spice: a PR to Andrew Kelly’s poop (yes, that’s the benchmark tool’s name) to add counters on Apple Silicon was politely rejected, spawning forks, memes, and multi-counter arms races. Minimalists argue you only need a few key stats; data hoarders want the full Pokédex—“Gotta catch ’em all… counters!” Some accuse Apple of gatekeeping because the detailed guide lives behind the developer portal, while others salute reverse-engineering heroes like ibireme. The discourse? A glorious tug-of-war between power users hunting the truth in silicon and pragmatists yelling, “Ship features, not graphs!” Meanwhile, jokes about “poop-scooping performance” are everywhere, because internet
Key Points
- •The author built a tool to fetch all PMU counters supported by Apple Silicon, informed by research into Apple’s private kperf API.
- •Apple Instruments shows a practical limit of about 8–10 counters at once, with event incompatibilities causing conflicts.
- •Two counters appear fixed on Apple Silicon—Cycles and Instructions—surfacing with FIXED aliases in Instruments.
- •A fork of Andrew Kelly’s tool (“poop”) supports fetching several predefined counters, but the author pursued a separate comprehensive tool.
- •Experiments were conducted on a MacBook with an M2 Pro running macOS 15.6.1; reverse-engineered kperf code by ibireme guided implementation.