Hi folks,
It seems that "AI PC" was everywhere in the CES 2025, which basically indicates the presence of the NPU device. Both AMD and Intel have integrated the NPU device
into their own new CPUs -- in that sense I guess the NPU device will be more popular
than discrete GPUs in the future, in terms of availability on a random user's computer.
For instance, Intel's U9 285K has an NPU, based on its official Ark page:
https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/products/sku/241060/intel-core-ultra-9-processor-285k-36m-cache-up-to-5-70-ghz/specifications.html
AMD's AI Max 395 also has an NPU (called AMD Ryzen AI):
https://www.amd.com/en/products/processors/laptop/ryzen/ai-300-series/amd-ryzen-ai-max-plus-395.html
The NPU devices are still very new to me. I did a little bit of research, and they
seem to need some new drivers and libraries:
* Intel:
https://github.com/intel/linux-npu-driver
https://github.com/intel/intel-npu-acceleration-library
* AMD:
https://github.com/amd/xdna-driver
Since they are still very new hardware, I think we have plenty time to prepare this for
the trixie+1 release. I just hope they are not as annoying as discrete GPUs from the green
compoany.
If anybody is interested in improving Debian's support on such new hardware, I'd suggest
direct the communications to Debian Deep Learning Team, and work with the team:
https://lists.debian.org/debian-ai/
The team's mailing list is targeted at machine learning and hardware acceleration at the
very beginning. And NPU was started from AI.
I'd like to learn if anybody here has experience working with those devices.
Do they run without non-free blobs? If they work well with just DFSG-compliant packages,
that would be great.
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