Tuesday, October 6, 2015

i7z: Monitor Intel i7, i5 And i3 Frequencies, Multipliers And More Under Linux

I needed a tool for monitoring the CPU frequencies while testing thermald + intel_pstate, and stumbled upon i7z, so I though I'd share it with you, in case you're not familiar with it.

i7z is a tool that reports Intel Core i7, i5 and i3 CPU information about Turbo Boost, per core CPU frequencies, multipliers, temperature as well as times spent in the C0/C1/C3/C6/C7 states, all in real time.

The tool comes with both console (ncurses) and GUI (Qt) versions, however the GUI doesn't have all the features available in the console version and further more, the GUI incorrectly adds C7 state values to the C0 state for Sandybridge and Ivybridge, so it reports things incorrectly. The console version is recommended.



i7z also supports outputing the results to a log file - from the i7z help:
i7z Tool Supports the following functions:
Append to a log file:  sudo i7z --write a [OR] sudo i7z -w a
Replacement instead of Append: sudo i7z --write l [OR] sudo i7z -w l
Default log file name is cpu_freq_log.txt (single socket) or cpu_freq_log_dual_%d.txt (dual socket)
Specifying a different log file: sudo i7z --logfile filename [OR] sudo i7z -l filename
Specifying a particular socket to print: sudo i7z --socket0 X 
In order to print to a second socket use: sudo i7z --socket1 X 
To turn the ncurses GUI off use: sudo i7z --nogui
Example: To print for two sockets and also change the log file: sudo i7z --socket0 0 --socket1 1 -logfile /tmp/logfilei7z -w l

For more information on i7z, see its Google Code page.


Install i7z in Ubuntu


Ubuntu 13.10 and 14.04 users can install i7z from the official Ubuntu repositories. To install it, use the following command:
sudo apt-get install i7z

Or, to install the i7z Qt GUI, use:
sudo apt-get install i7z-gui

For older Ubuntu versions, you can try to use the Ubuntu 13.10 deb files which you can download from here: 32bit | 64bit (the debs can be found under "Built files" at the bottom). Note that I tested this in VirtualBox and the packages install successfully in older Ubuntu versions, but I don't know if i7z actually works since it doesn't work properly in VirtualBox.

Then, start i7z using the following command:
sudo i7z

Or, to run the i7z GUI (not recommended for the reasons stated above), use the following command (there's no desktop file so you won't find it in the menu / Dash):
gksu i7z_GUI

For other Linux distributions, search for i7z in the repositories or grab the source from Google Code.

Also see:
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