Configurations for Intel® NPU with OpenVINO™

The Intel® NPU device requires a proper driver to be installed in the system. Make sure you use the most recent supported driver for your hardware setup.

Linux

The driver is maintained as open source and may be found in the following repository, together with comprehensive information on installation and system requirements: github.com/intel/linux-npu-driver

It is recommended to check for the latest version of the driver.

Make sure you use a supported OS version, as well as install make, gcc, and Linux kernel headers. To check the NPU state, use the dmesg command in the console. A successful boot-up of the NPU should give you a message like this one:

[  797.193201] [drm] Initialized intel_vpu 0.<version number> for 0000:00:0b.0 on minor 0

The current requirement for inference on NPU is the minimum of Ubuntu 22.04, kernel version of 6.6.

Windows

The Intel® NPU driver for Windows is available through Windows Update but it may also be installed manually by downloading the NPU driver package and following the Windows driver installation guide.

If a driver has already been installed you should be able to find ‘Intel(R) NPU Accelerator’ in Windows Device Manager. If you cannot find such a device, the NPU is most likely listed in “Other devices” as “Multimedia Video Controller.”