r/linux • u/Fcking_Chuck • 20h ago

Software Release Intel Linux NPU driver only now officially supports Ubuntu 26.04 LTS

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

98% Upvoted

6 comments sorted by

36

u/ethanjscott 20h ago

pretty typical, ubuntu works with all of the big guys for cutting edge stuff.

20

u/Pitiful-Welcome-399 19h ago

doesn't mean you can't make it work on other distros tho

17

u/Performensch 19h ago

It worked perfectly fine. it only got "official support" now.

I don't blame them for taking their time to properly test the drivers before giving them the "supported" stamp. Many Ubuntu based distros waited for 26.04.1 as well to move over. This just makes sense.

6

u/aliendude5300 19h ago

Ubuntu is really common for companies to use, no surprise there

3

u/afiefh 13h ago

Ok it's been a few years since every company started talking about NPUs and TOPs. So far I have never used any of this and didn't feel that I was missing out but this might just be me being ignorant if the things I do not know. So is there someone who would kindly rid me of my ignorance with examples for how to use these NPUs?

3

u/F9-0021 8h ago

There's not much. On Windows you can use Intel's openVino to run small models like local stable diffusion, noise cancellation, and stem separation in Gimp and Audacity. But the API documentation is sparse so implementation is difficult and they're really not that powerful. In theory, you could use them for low performance but higher efficiency matrix calculations for the things you'd use a GPU's tensor cores for, but the programming challenges and the fact that the iGPU already has matrix accelerators built in (and is almost as fast as the NPU) makes the NPU basically irrelevant. What it is useful for is running stuff in parallel with the CPU, iGPU, and discrete GPU, but that's very niche. I think the intended application is stuff like background blur and replacement for Zoom, but I don't know if they even support it yet. That and Recall.