I got tired of btop not seeing my Mac's chip, so I built siltop
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btop is beautiful. But on my M-series Mac it can't tell me the one thing I actually want to know: what is the chip doing? No watts, no GPU, no per-core clocks.So I built siltop: btop's calm, with eyes on the silicon. Real power, clocks and temps straight from the SMC and IOReport, no sudo, about 1.3% of one core (btop is ~2.5% on the same machine).It also tells you what's wrong in plain words ("Busy: rustc using 9.1 cores", "Hot: fans at 80%") before you read a single graph.10-second try, no load needed: brew install cloaky233/tap/siltop && siltop --demo Rust, MIT/Apache, no telemetry, no network unless you turn on update checks.Curious what your Mac shows. M1/M2 Ultra and M5 Max owners especially, I haven't seen yours yet.
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HN · launched Oct 17, 2026 · 17 upvotes (top 32%)
- Horizontal
- Observability & eval
- Developer
- Not AI
- Hobby / open-source project
Similar launches
See all 204 similar launches →Could you build this?
No Building this requires low-level systems programming in C/Rust and reverse-engineering undocumented macOS Apple Silicon private frameworks (IOReport and SMC keys) without root privileges.
What it would actually take: Requires low-level systems programming (C, C++, or Rust) interacting with macOS private Mach/IOKit APIs and undocumented IOReport channels for Apple Silicon power rails, CPU/GPU clusters, and SMC temperature sensors. Additionally, it demands building a high-performance terminal UI (TUI) with precise sub-millisecond polling and minimal CPU overhead.
Discussion
20 comments analyzed.
Competitors mentioned: btop, htop, top
Concerns raised: AI-generated README and descriptions, vibecoded unmaintained project, reinventing existing tools rather than contributing, cringe Claude-like promotional copy
Feature requests: write READMEs by hand
Competitors
Other products that read as similar to this one : 204 launches clear the similarity bar, closest 8 shown.
Attention rank: #79 of 205 (itself plus its competitors, highest first, normalized so YC and Product Hunt are compared fairly).
Launched 347 days after the earliest competitor.
- m6502, a 6502 CPU for FPGAs and Tiny Tapeout · hn · 2026-02-18 · 5 upvotes · similarity 0.49
- We built an MCP for Windows · hn · 2026-04-14 · 8 upvotes · similarity 0.48
- ThermPort · ph · 2026-10-06 · 1 upvotes · similarity 0.47
- Pyre — System monitoring for your Mac · ph · 2026-10-10 · 1 upvotes · similarity 0.45
- Voltyn · ph · 2026-10-06 · 1 upvotes · similarity 0.44
- On the edge of Apple Silicon memory speeds · hn · 2026-01-17 · 5 upvotes · similarity 0.44
- Shoehorn, a library to quantize an LLM to fit your Mac's VRAM · hn · 2026-08-14 · 6 upvotes · similarity 0.43
- MacBreeze · ph · 2026-09-28 · 2 upvotes · similarity 0.43
Other launches for this product
More details
- External ID
- 50128654
- Company
- n/a
- Product
- siltop
- Website domain
- github.com
- Cohort
- n/a
- Upvotes percentile
- 0.68
- All tags
- n/a
- AI summary
- terminal system monitor for apple silicon macs
- Manually corrected
- No