Ahead of Intel Panther Lake laptops expected to debut next month at CES in Las Vegas, the Linux driver support for the next-gen “50xx” NPU of Panther Lake is now complete. The last piece of the driver support puzzle is now in place with the NPU firmware binaries having been upstreamed today to the linux-firmware.git repository.
Going back to October 2025 was initial Intel NPU Linux driver patches for 5th Gen NPU hardware that was mentioned as for Panther Lake. That Intel 5th Gen NPU support was upstreamed to the Intel IVPU kernel driver in Linux 6.13. A few days ago the Intel user-space NPU Linux driver advertised Panther Lake support. Now the last piece of that driver equation is aligned with the Intel 50xx NPU firmware binary appearing in linux-firmware.git. This firmware binary is needed by the IVPU kernel driver for actually initializing the neural processing unit. With the binary now being in linux-firmware.git it can be easily picked up by different Linux distribution vendors for shipping as part of their linux-firmware packages.
This Git merge added the Intel 5th Gen NPU / Panther Lake firmware binary as well as updating the NPU firmware for existing Core Ultra NPUs.
The Intel Panther Lake NPU firmware binary comes in at 0.98 MB, slightly less than the 1.0 MB size of the 4th Gen NPU firmware and much smaller than the 2.4 MB blob for the 3rd Gen NPU firmware.
The Panther Lake Linux support appears largely in shape with the latest upstream code. We’ll see though how the laptop compatibility ultimately plays out as well as the Intel Panther Lake Linux support if/when receiving any Panther Lake hardware.
