Intel NPU Linux Driver 1.2 Released

Intel today published a new version of its NPU Linux driver user-space components that goes along with their iVPU accelerator kernel driver for enabling the Neural Processing Unit (NPU) found within their latest Meteor Lake systems.

The new Intel NPU Linux Driver 1.2 release bumps the oneAPI Level Zero support to v1.16.1, the Level Zero API support has been expanded to be more robust, and it can also now be built against external Level Zero implementations. The v1.2 release also has updated Intel NPU compiler code (mtl_npu_ud_2024_08_rc3), updated Intel NPU firmware (ci_tag_ud202408_vpu_rc_20240221_2101), and various other internal updates and fixes. Overall this v1.2 update appears to be mostly a maintenance iteration for their NPU driver code without any major features/improvements introduced.

The Intel NPU Linux driver support continues to be mostly tested with their OpenVINO AI toolkit. For those wanting an overview of the Intel NPU Linux driver stack if previously not having investigated it:

The Intel NPU Linux Driver 1.2 release can be downloaded from GitHub both in source form as well as Ubuntu (Debian) package binaries that have been validated against Ubuntu 22.04 LTS.