Intel's 2nd Gen Core Ultra family codenamed Arrow Lake already has initial NPU (Neural Processing Unit) support added to Linux.
Intel's Next-Gen Arrow Lake NPU Already Sees Compatibility at Linux, Team Blue Steps Up Future AI Adoption
Phoronix reveals that Intel has released the respective PCI IDs required by Intel's IPVU driver at Linux to bring in support for Arrow Lake's NPU. As revealed earlier, there are quite many similarities between the NPU present in Meteor Lake and Arrow Lake lineups, and both of them have the same driver code path as well, which makes support in Linux much easier.
Our previous coverages on Intel's dedicated AI engine mounted on their CPUs have been quite extensive; however, to sum it all up, Intel's NPU, or VPU is Intel's way to deal with the rising developments within the AI industry. The aim behind actually integrating an AI engine specified for similar workloads is a method towards making advanced computational performance accessible to an average consumer without the need to go out of the way to buy additional equipment.
I believe that the CPU industry will indeed move towards a similar implementation, and we have seen a glimpse of it with AMD's efforts towards a similar dedicated AI platform dubbed the "AMD XDNA" under the Ryzen AI line of products. It will be interesting to see how such engines contribute towards the development of genAI since now many consumers can harness high AI performance.
The Intel Arrow Lake CPUs are scheduled for launch in the second half of 2024 and will feature a brand new core architecture and lots of changes over the 1st Gen Core Ultra family codenamed Meteor Lake. The lineup would also be headed to both desktop and mobility platforms while being based on the next-gen 20A process node. You can read more on Arrow Lake here.
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