i7z – What Is Your i7/i5/i3 CPU Doing?

📅 December 20, 2016
Are you pondering important life questions, such as, “What is the temperature and current frequency of my Core i7 CPU?”

“I have no idea what C0/C1/C3/C6/C7 states are, but I sure want to know how much time my CPU spends in them.”

“What is the stepping, model, and family info of my i7 CPU? Are we related in some way?”

Well, ponder no longer because the command line program i7z (a reporting tool for Intel i7/i5/i3 processors) will answer those questions for you in real time. And if that is not enough, information can be logged to a log file for serious analysis later.

First Things First

First of all, i7z only works with Intel i7/i5/i3 processors, so if you are not using any of them, then you will be greeted with a message similar to this if you try to run the program:

Running i7z on a system with an AMD processor. This is running from Linux Mint 18.1 MATE in VirtualBox. i7z wants a real Intel CPU.

Note that i7z will work directly on real hardware or from within VirtualBox running on a system using a real Intel i7/i5/i3 CPU. Yes, you can run i7z from inside a virtual machine if it is running on a Linux system that has an actual Intel i7/i5/i3 CPU on the motherboard. i7z will run the same as if executing directly on the host OS.

Installation

Installation is easy. Install from Synaptic or the command line:

sudo apt-get install i7z

There is also a Qt GUI version called i7z-gui, but I never could get that to work. The command line version, i7z, works well. Synaptic reports a reporting error with the GUI version, so I would avoid that anyway.

If you want to run the GUI version, install i7z-gui. Enter this at the command line:

sudo i7z_GUI

i7z_GUI. Despite installing i7z-gui, the program name is i7z_GUI — confusingly different.

What Happens?

Run i7z as root. This is a requirement.

sudo i7z

Wait while i7z displays some processor information and then some real-time CPU activity.

Basic CPU information. Here, i7z is running on a system with an Intel i7 processor. (Linux Mint 18.1)

We then get to witness the juicy details updated in real time. Temperature, core voltage, state %, and frequencies across the cores are visible.

• Socket [0] denotes a system/motherboard using one CPU.
• Physical cores=4 means the CPU (i7 in this example) has four physical cores.
• Logical cores=8 denotes hyperthreading. Four physical cores, but each has hyperthreading enabled.

There is plenty of other CPU information to peruse, so have fun!