Via the openSUSE Innovator Initiative, packaging of the Intel Neural Processing Unit (NPU) driver for the openSUSE ecosystem has begun. This is helping to jump-start the Intel NPU support within the openSUSE space although user-space applications ready to leverage the Intel NPU still remains very limited.
The Intel NPU driver support is now available via – current “experimental” – packages across openSUSE Tumbleweed, openSUSE Slowroll, openSUSE Leap 15.6, and openSUSE Leap 16.0. This Intel NPU driver is available as the linux-npu-driver. Yes, the name is rather poor considering it’s Intel-specific and the “linux-” rather redundant given it’s within the confines of openSUSE.
Cool! I didn’t know there was a user space component needed (I guess that makes sense, just didn’t think about it). I can’t wait to see what Ollama looks like accelerated with one of these.