Following the recent Xe3P graphics enablement for Nova Lake as well as Nova Lake compiler target enablement and other early hardware enablement for Intel’s Nova Lake processors, today has brought initial enablement for Nova Lake’s NPU.
Compared to Intel Panther Lake and Wildcat Lake having a 5th Gen Intel NPU, Nova Lake will feature a 6th Gen NPU. The patch today confirms the Intel “NPU6” generation for Nova Lake.
“Add support for NPU6 generation that will be present on Nova Lake CPUs. As with previous generations, it maintains compatibility so no bigger functional changes.”
The enablement patch is just 15 lines of code for the new PCI device ID, identifying as Intel NPU 60xx series, and a new Intel NPU6 firmware blob (pu_60xx_v1.bin) but otherwise is following the same code paths as the existing Intel NPU5 support.
We’ll see as time goes on if any other new Intel NPU6 features are exposed for Nova Lake or if it ends up being quite similar to NPU5.
