In addition to Intel talking up their Panther Lake SoC and its Xe3 integrated graphics at their Tech Tour in Arizona last week, they also hosted sessions on additional aspects of Panther Lake like the IPU 7.5 for web cams and the new NPU 5 IP for AI acceleration. For those wondering, the Intel NPU 5 support under Linux is already largely squared away.
Intel’s presentation on NPU 5 was catering to the Microsoft Windows Copilot + experience and all the enhancements found over NPU 5 with Lunar Lake.
While Linux wasn’t mentioned, the Linux driver support is ready to go – besides still waiting on the NPU 5 firmware binaries to be published.
Going back one year already as covered on Phoronix, Intel IVPU Linux kernel driver patches for NPU Gen 5 were posted and confirmed this fifth generation NPU design was for Panther Lake. That Intel NPU 5 support in the IVPU kernel driver was upstreamed back in Linux 6.13.
So as far as the kernel driver support is concerned, that’s been upstream for a while but we’ll see with time if there is any missing features or gaps still to address.
As mentioned there still is the NPU 5 firmware that needs to be published. Within linux-firmware.git’s intel/vpu directory is where the NPU firmware resides with currently having just the NPU 3 and NPU 4 binaries. Typically the firmware binaries are provided closer to the actual hardware release.
Over in user-space on Linux, the Intel NPU story isn’t so compelling. The main user-space software capable of using the Intel NPU with the IVPU kernel driver is the OpenVINO AI plug-in. So if you are using OpenVINO as part of your AI workflow on Linux, you can it while the user-space support outside of there is very limited… A problem also seen with the AMD Ryzen AI NPU on Linux and the various other AI/NPU accelerators out there.
But long story short, the Linux support is indeed there for Intel NPU 5 ahead of Panther Lake availability, if your software workflow is ready to the Intel NPU / IVPU driver.
While on the topic of accelerators with Panther Lake, at the Intel Tech Tour I don’t recall hearing any mentions at all of the IAA accelerators with Panther Lake. Linux driver patches have confirmed IAA accelerators for Panther Lake and Wildcat Lake for that previously Xeon-only functionality. Presumably Intel is waiting to talk more about that closer to Panther Lake laptop availability in 2026 when they reveal SKU tables, etc.
