Intel Linux NPU Driver 1.6 Released For Meteor Lake, Arrow Lake & Lunar Lake

Intel engineers on Wednesday released the Linux NPU Driver v1.6 release for this for this MIT-licensed user-space mode driver support for the Neural Processing Unit (NPU) found since the Core Ultra Series 1 "Meteor Lake" SoCs and currently supporting the upcoming Lunar Lake and Arrow Lake processors as well. This Intel Linux NPU Driver in user-space interfaces with their iVPU kernel accelerator driver for making a nice open-source and upstream NPU software stack on Linux systems.

As far as the changes in the Intel Linux NPU Driver v1.6 release, they haven't published any change-log for this new version and the commits since the v1.5.1 NPU driver are squashed to just one commit updating their public repository... So it's not exactly friendly for monitoring changes.

This Intel Linux NPU Driver v1.6 release has been validated across Intel Meteor Lake and upcoming Lunar Lake and Arrow Lake platforms atop Ubuntu Linux with the Linux 6.8 kernel driver. This NPU driver update does shift to using OpenVINO 2024.3 rather than OpenVINO 2024.2 and other minor revisions but beyond that there is no concise overview of other alterations.

In any event those wanting the latest Intel user-mode driver support for their NPU can find the code up on GitHub while their kernel driver continues to be maintained within the mainline tree -- something that AMD is still behind in with their Ryzen AI (XDNA) support as they continue to work on upstreaming their kernel driver and expanding their user-space software support.