At the Intel Tech Tour in Arizona, an entire slot was devoted to talking up their next-gen IPU to be found with upcoming high-end Panther Lake laptops. This was in addition to the main Intel Panther Lake / Xe3 presentation. IPU product marketing manager Tomer Rider presented on their IPU7.5 tech, but unfortunately like we have seen with Intel’s IPU tech since Alder Lake, there are user-space binary blobs involved.
Intel talked up their IPU 7.5 image processing tech that can be used by Panther Lake. I asked during a round table on the IPU afterwards whether it’s now mandated or anything to encourage laptop vendors to it, since we have seen only a portion of the laptop vendors IPU 6 and IPU 7. It’s still up to the vendor to decide if they want to the Intel IPU or go with some lower-cost USB-based web camera solution.
IPU 7.5 sounds great from a hardware perspective and they even advertise “Linux” support. When asked by someone else during the Intel IPU roundtable, Tomer commented that indeed there is Linux support and is an important factor for OEMs/ODMs these days. Though that becomes an important caveat. If you are new to Phoronix, more background information on this situation can be found within Greg KH Recommends Avoiding Alder Lake Laptops – Intel Webcam Linux Driver Long Ways Out and Intel IPU6 Web Camera Support Still Poses A Challenge For Linux Laptops.
With IPU 6 and IPU 7, closed-source user-space software is required otherwise you need to rely on libcamera’s software image signal processing “Soft ISP” support. I asked about that during the IPU round table and whether anything changes for IPU 7.5. Unfortunately, it’s still that way for IPU 7.5 with requiring binary-only user-space libraries.
So either relying on closed-source user-space bits or going with the software-based image signal processing and losing out on some of the benefits of the Intel web camera tech while also utilizing more of your CPU cores for the task.
Over in kernel space, Linux 6.17 introduced the IPU 7 video driver to be used by Lunar Lake for IPU 7.0 and future Panther Lake laptops too, so presumably covers IPU 7.5 otherwise will be extended in future Linux kernel versions. But again it’s too bad that there isn’t a fully open-source stack to fully leverage the Intel IPU/ISP hardware capabilities.
Over on GitHub is the intel/ipu7-camera-bins repository where for Lunar Lake / IPU 7.0 they have the IPU7 firmware binaries, library binary dependencies for the IPU7 camera HAL, and just the header files for those binary libraries. Presumably they’ll be extending that ipu7-camera-bins repository for IPU 7.5 once Panther Lake laptops are ready to ship in 2026.
AMD for their part does provide a fully open-source software stack including use of their ISP hardware rather than resorting to a software ISP on the CPU cores. The only downside there is still waiting on the ISP4 driver to be mainlined – hopefully now for Linux v6.19… In any event the HP ZBook Ultra G1a is the only laptop so far making use of the AMD ISP4.
One other interesting bit from the IPU 7.5 round-table… Given Intel’s recent work on eUSB2V2 web camera support in Linux I asked whether any lower-cost Panther Lake or Wildcat Lake laptops might be opting for using Embedded USB2 V2. From what I gather, that eUSB2V2 web cameras on laptops won’t be for this coming generation but rather the generation afterward. I was just curious whether that eUSB2V2 driver might come into play for laptops in the near-term but will still be further out as one less kernel driver to worry about this generation.
