An open-source system monitor called siltop has been released for Apple Silicon Macs, giving terminal users a dashboard designed around the hardware information available on Apple’s M-series chips. The project supports M1 through M5 systems and presents CPU, GPU, memory, power, temperature, fan, network, disk and process information in one interface.

The software’s documentation says power and clock measurements are read through Apple’s System Management Controller and IOReport interfaces without root privileges. That focus differentiates it from general-purpose terminal monitors whose displays may not reflect the layout and capabilities of Apple’s system-on-chip designs. Siltop also adjusts its panels to the machine: fan readings are absent on fanless MacBook Air models, while desktops do not show a battery section.

Some measurements remain constrained by macOS. The project marks process-memory values that the operating system withholds from an ordinary user, rather than filling the gaps with estimates. On macOS 27, where some power counters update only every few seconds, the monitor retains the last genuine reading and shows its age. Its CPU graph also weights activity by clock speed, so it can differ from Activity Monitor’s utilization figure; separate cluster rows show the unweighted busy share and frequency.

The repository reports that, in the developer’s test on an M5 Pro with a one-second interval, siltop consumed about 1.3% of a single CPU core. The same documented test measured btop at roughly 2.5% and macmon at about 1.4%. Those figures are project benchmarks on one system, not an independent cross-platform performance test.

Siltop includes interactive help, menus, themes, alerts and a process table. It can also serve data locally, binding to 127.0.0.1 by default, and includes a fleet mode that uses the operator’s own SSH setup. The developer says telemetry is not sent anywhere by default. An optional update check, disabled until enabled by the user, contacts GitHub’s releases API no more than once per day; crash reports remain on disk.

Installation has one practical caveat. Release archives include checksums, but the binary is not notarized, so macOS may quarantine browser downloads until the user explicitly removes that attribute. The project is limited to Apple Silicon: it can compile elsewhere, but its hardware readers do not provide useful data on Intel Macs or Linux. Siltop is offered under a choice of MIT or Apache 2.0 licensing, with architecture notes, hardware research and test guidance published in its repository. The documentation also asks users encountering unsupported hardware to attach diagnostic output to bug reports, giving the maintainer a path to broaden coverage while keeping measurements tied to observed devices.