Intel Posts New Linux Driver For "Versatile Processing Unit" Coming With 14th Gen CPUs

Intel has posted a new open-source Linux VPU driver today... Not Video Processing Unit, but it's for a Versatile Processing Unit coming with 14th Gen Core processors.

This is the first I've heard of this new Versatile Processing Unit (VPU) block coming to 14th Gen Core (non-server) CPUs, a.k.a. Meteor Lake. This Intel VPU is to be used for AI inference acceleration for deep learning applications.

This Intel VPU driver will live under the Linux Direct Rendering Manager (DRM) umbrella like their graphics driver.

This Intel VPU driver is GPLv2-only licensed while its user-space stack will be making use of the Intel oneAPI Level Zero API and OpenVINO. They expect to have their user-space code for this VPU interface open-sourced publicly by the end of Q3. The firmware for the Intel VPU will be closed-source.

This new driver is now out for review. This new VPU kernel driver is 8.5k lines of code in its current form.