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⇱ Intel NPU Firmware Files Upstreamed To linux-firmware.git - Phoronix


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Intel NPU Firmware Files Upstreamed To linux-firmware.git

Written by Michael Larabel in Intel on 9 March 2025 at 07:22 AM EDT. 1 Comment
For two years now the Intel IVPU accelerator driver has been part of the mainline kernel for supporting the Neural Processing Unit (NPU) that's part of the Core Ultra "Meteor Lake" CPUs and newer. Only this week though was the firmware for the Intel NPUs now upstreamed to the linux-firmware.git repository.

In making it easier to get the NPU working on Intel Core Ultra SoCs under Linux, linux-firmware.git has added the Intel NPU firmware binaries to provide for a nice out-of-the-box experience with all Linux distributions pulling from this repository for device firmware/microcode files.

The push to linux-firmware.git on Friday adds the firmware files for Intel 37xx and 40xx NPUs that correlate to existing Meteor Lake, Arrow Lake, and Lunar Lake platforms.

The Intel license on these firmware binaries is under a standard redistribution license for firmware binaries. It's around 2~2.5MB per NPU for the firmware binary if you were wondering its size.

👁 Intel NPU block diagram


This commit is what lands the initial Intel NPU firmware files.

Michael Larabel is the principal author of Phoronix.com and founded the site in 2004 with a focus on enriching the Linux hardware experience. Michael has written more than 20,000 articles covering the state of Linux hardware support, Linux performance, graphics drivers, and other topics. Michael is also the lead developer of the Phoronix Test Suite, Phoromatic, and OpenBenchmarking.org automated benchmarking software. He can be followed via Twitter, LinkedIn, or contacted via MichaelLarabel.com.