cpubars is a simple terminal-based tool for monitoring CPU load in real-time, especially tailored to monitoring large multicores over SSH.
cpubars uses Unicode block drawing characters to show the precise breakdown of CPU usage for each CPU.
cpubars itself consumes almost no CPU, so it won't perturb other processes like benchmarks, and uses the terminal efficiently (and hence remote connections over SSH, Mosh, etc.).
cpubars can operate in either Unicode or ASCII mode. In Unicode mode, cpubars can show fine-grained divisions in each CPU usage bar. ASCII mode is more broadly compatible, but can only show coarse-grained divisions.
If cpubars looks funky, pass -a to force it into ASCII mode.
cpubars will default to Unicode if your locale advertises Unicode
support (e.g., the LANG environment variable is en_US.utf8), but
this doesn't necessarily mean your terminal supports Unicode (or that
it supports it correctly).