Linux 6.13 To Introduce Intel 5th Gen NPU Support For Panther Lake

Earlier this month I wrote about Intel's Linux software engineers posting patches adding 5th Gen NPU support to the IVPU accelerator driver for that updated neural processing unit to be found with next-gen Panther Lake processors. Those 5th Gen NPU driver patches for Panther Lake are now queued for introduction with the upcoming Linux 6.13 kernel cycle.

The Panther Lake NPU patches confirmed the "5th generation Intel NPU" but from the driver perspective was a small code addition over the existing NPU support for Meteor Lake / Arrow Lake / Lunar Lake with this iVPU open-source driver.

Those Panther Lake NPU driver patches in turn were sent out today as part of this week's drm-misc-next pull request going to DRM-Next. With the code now going into DRM-Next, it will in turn be submitted for the mainline Linux 6.13 kernel once that merge window opens up by late November. Linux 6.13 stable in turn will be out in February of next year, plenty of time ahead of Panther Lake processors expected to premiere later in 2025.

This NPU/iVPU driver support goes along with a lot of other Panther Lake enablement we've been seeing in recent weeks for the different Intel drivers within the Linux kernel.