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Copyright (C) 2022-2025 Intel Corporation

SPDX-License-Identifier: MIT

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# Intel® NPU driver

## Introduction

This repository contains driver for Intel® NPU device.

Intel® NPU device is an AI inference accelerator integrated with Intel client CPUs,
starting from Intel® Core™ Ultra generation of CPUs (formerly known as Meteor Lake).
It enables energy-efficient execution of artificial neural network tasks.

To make sure that your system has an NPU available, please follow
[the steps](https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/support/articles/000097597/processors.html).

The full device name is Neural Processing Unit, but the Linux kernel driver uses
the older name - Versatile Processing Unit (VPU).

## Releases

[The release page contains the binaries and supported component versions.](https://github.com/intel/linux-npu-driver/releases)

## Build and troubleshooting

[See docs/overview.md](docs/overview.md)

## License

Intel® NPU driver is distributed under the MIT License.

You may obtain a copy of the license at: https://opensource.org/licenses/MIT

## See also

* [Intel® OneApi Level Zero](https://github.com/oneapi-src/level-zero/)
* [OpenVINO™](https://github.com/openvinotoolkit/openvino.git)
* [OpenVINO™ GenAI](https://openvinotoolkit.github.io/openvino.genai/)
* [How to run OpenVINO™ on a Linux AI PC](https://medium.com/openvino-toolkit/how-to-run-openvino-on-a-linux-ai-pc-52083ce14a98)
* [OpenVINO™ AI Plugins for GIMP](https://github.com/intel/openvino-ai-plugins-gimp)
* [Canonical brings GenAI to GIMP 3.0 with Intel® OpenVINO™ AI Plugins](https://discourse.ubuntu.com/t/canonical-brings-genai-to-gimp-3-0-with-intel-openvino-ai-plugins/54799)
* [OpenVINO™ AI Plugins for Audacity*](https://github.com/intel/openvino-plugins-ai-audacity)
* [Building chatbot on Intel® NPU](https://medium.com/openvino-toolkit/building-a-simple-chatbot-on-npu-a-step-by-step-guide-30257fb85ef3)
