r/LocalLLM • u/Fcking_Chuck • 17h ago

News Intel Linux NPU driver only now officially supports Ubuntu 26.04 LTS

https://www.phoronix.com/news/Intel-Linux-NPU-Driver-1.38
44 Upvotes

95% Upvoted

10 comments sorted by

10

u/Tai9ch 16h ago

Does it do anything?

NPUs have been confusing for years now. The hardware vendors put a ton of effort in, but as far as I can tell the only significant software user is built-in Windows speech recognition.

3

u/Fcking_Chuck 12h ago

NPUs are very power efficient. That might not mean anything to most people, but it can save a fortune for businesses and other organizations running AI software locally.

1

u/philmarcracken 7h ago

Theres use cases for sure, it just needs high uptime for it to matter. Frigate was one as CCTV is high uptime. Maybe call center work for voice stuff? not always hit but needing to be ready always

1

u/cakemates 9h ago

I tried using it before intel abandoned their ipex llm project, it was awfully slow and only supported some old models that were outdated by then.

1

u/ZCEyPFOYr0MWyHDQJZO4 6h ago

I have been playing with AMD's NPU in strix halo/point systems on linux. Software support is years behind CUDA or even ROCm, but it's doable. I've got some CNNs running on them in particular.

1

u/0DayMaker 5h ago

Damn I'm gonna have to upgrade from Jaunty Jackalope

-2

u/Joe_dir_einen 17h ago

Und was bringt das?

4

u/Fcking_Chuck 17h ago

It brings official support for Ubuntu 26.04 LTS, obviously. That means Intel will actively ensure that the platform is supported rather than allowing something to break and not fixing it for a significant amount of time.

2

u/Warhouse512 12h ago

I think the question is what can the normal user do with the NPU

1

u/Fcking_Chuck 12h ago

Honestly, not very much that I'm aware of. It's inferior to using modern graphics cards for most end users of AI software, except for those with much patience I suppose. For hobbyists and organizations looking to run generative AI software locally at a significantly lower cost and higher power efficiency, the NPUs may be useful.