CPU ID utility?

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Level 2

188 points

CPU ID utility?

Is there a utility similar to (or ported from) Intel's Processor Identification Utility that will run directly under MacOS?

Intel supplies a Windows version and a bootable version, but no Mac version. The Windows version would not run for me on top of Parallels...

2GHZ MacPro, 3GB RAM, 660GB RAID0, RadeonX1900 (reflashed PC version), Mac OS X (10.5.5), Aperture 2.1.1

Posted on Nov 17, 2008 2:29 PM

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Answer 1

Feb 12, 2009 11:06 AM in response to Steve Hoge

if you run sysctl -a, you should get all the cpuid information in some form or another. The stepping in particular is reported as machdep.cpu.stepping. All the machdep.cpu.* keys appear (on my machine at least) to be the information the cpuid spits out. If you need anything else, you can always just write a simple program that issues the cpuid instruction/subfunction itself, and interpret the results as you need.

Hope this helps!

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Answer 2

Steve Hoge Author

Level 2

188 points

Feb 11, 2009 10:15 AM in response to Steve Hoge

I'm still poking around trying to figure out how to determine the stepping codes for my Woodcrest Xeon 5130 CPU (ie, a " 2GHz Dual-Core Intel Xeon"), since it wasn't enough of a priority to install Boot Camp to run Intel's bootable version of the CPU ID tool.

Anyone out there that has a low-level CPU ID tool that will run directly under MacOS or on the ? Is there a hook available in the EFI that would expose this information?

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Answer 3

Steve Hoge Author

Level 2

188 points

Feb 12, 2009 11:50 AM in response to orangekay

Thanks.

Digging into the output from ioreg(1) indicated that the Hardware Monitor application from www.bresink.de is able to access this info, a 16-bit value which it calls "CPUSignature".

So when Hardware Monitor's "System Information" window is enabled and "More Info..." is selected, the Family/Model/Stepping values are shown; concatenating these as hex nibbles yields the more familiar CPUID value used by references like this. From there the standard Intel S-spec values can be deduced.

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Answer 4

orangekay

Level 5

4,085 points

Feb 11, 2009 11:36 AM in response to Steve Hoge

If it's not in the IORegistry then you probably can't read it.

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