I had a habit of touching the strip of metal above the keys on my old macbook air, since that heats up before the fan becomes audible.
The sensible approach, of course, is to add a load monitor to the menu bar; now with my new m1 macbook, I can simply make the appropriate noises myself, as necessary. This is the UNIX way.
"MenuBar Stats" has a versatile collection of widgets to add to the menu bar. I'd prefer something open source though, if anyone has recommendations, please share.
Once you're running a tool like that, it is interesting to see the efficiency cores often saturated and the performance cores usually sleeping.
You can do this with xbar [0] (which is also just a super cool app). Looks like someone even made one specifically for checking the CPU throttling speed [1]
The sensible approach, of course, is to add a load monitor to the menu bar; now with my new m1 macbook, I can simply make the appropriate noises myself, as necessary. This is the UNIX way.