Intel Arrow Lake's NPU/VPU Very Similar To Meteor Lake - Linux Driver Patch Posted

With Meteor Lake comes the introduction of the Versatile Processing Unit (VPU) that is now marketed by Intel as the Neural Processing Unit (NPU). Recent versions of the Linux kernel have the "IVPU" accelerator driver to support Meteor Lake's VPU/NPU while now a patch is pending to extend that support for next-generation Arrow Lake processors.

Intel's Arrow Lake NPU appears very similar to that of Meteor Lake with the driver enablement coming down to adding new PCI IDs. Meanwhile, as previously reported on Phoronix, the VPU/NPU with Lunar Lake brings more significant changes with the open-source driver changes already underway there. With Lunar Lake is the new VPU4 IP and the Linux 6.6 kernel with its updated IVPU driver already has initial support there.

Between Meteor Lake and Lunar Lake is Arrow Lake. This patch adding the new Arrow Lake PCI IDs to the existing Meteor Lake driver code paths for this DRM accelerator driver is all that's needed to enable the VPU.

It will be very interesting to see how this Intel NPU (VPU) support plays out. Besides the open-source Linux kernel driver already upstream, OpenVINO supports this new accelerator along with other AI software surely to embrace it given that it will be found with all Meteor Lake SKUs.