Intel Panther Lake Introducing 5th Gen NPU - Initial Linux Patches Posted

Intel's Linux engineers continue working on preparing for next-generation hardware support within the kernel well ahead of launch. The latest on the recent enablement around next-gen Panther Lake processors is enabling a new "5th Gen" neural processing unit (NPU) to be found with Panther Lake P.

Posted today were an initial set of patches for enabling the "5th generation Intel NPU" to be found with Panther Lake CPUs. While a new NPU generation, the initial enablement is just a few dozen lines of code. The Intel 5th Gen NPU is largely taking the same driver code paths within the iVPU driver as found with the 4th Gen NPU in Lunar Lake. There is though new 5th Gen NPU firmware binaries that will be required.

We'll also see if any other iVPU driver changes in the coming weeks/months are required for rounding out the 5th Gen NPU support with any new features or capabilities.

As of right now is just this patch series providing the initial plumbing for the 5th generation Intel NPUs and confirmation they'll be found with Panther Lake processors.

Intel Core Ultra 300 "Panther Lake" processors are expected to succeed Lunar Lake in 2025. Panther Lake is expected to be produced on Intel's 18A process node. This NPU work is just the latest in a number of patches beginning to prep the Linux kernel for Panther Lake.