Team Blue's marketing team has kicked into hype mode—Meteor Lake is launching at the tail end of 2023—with a shift in naming conventions comes another rebranding of internal technologies. The previously identified versatile processing unit (VPU) is now going under a different moniker: "Intel will usher in the age of the AI PC with the upcoming Intel Core Ultra processors, code-named Meteor Lake, featuring Intel's first integrated neural processing unit, or NPU, for power-efficient AI acceleration and local inference on the PC. Intel confirmed Core Ultra will launch Dec. 14." Michael Larabel, principal author at Phoronix, has noticed that newly updated versions of the Linux kernel have the "IVPU" accelerator driver bundled in. This will: "support Meteor Lake's VPU/NPU, while a patch is pending to extend that support for next-generation Arrow Lake processors."

In his opinion, there are some shared aspects across the two CPU generations: "Intel's Arrow Lake NPU appears very similar to that of Meteor Lake with the driver enablement coming down to adding new PCI IDs...(with) this patch adding the new Arrow Lake PCI IDs to the existing Meteor Lake driver code paths for this DRM accelerator driver is all that's needed to enable the VPU." Team Blue jumped two generations ahead at this week's Innovation event—Lunar Lake showed up in a live demo. Larabel believes that this late 2024 CPU family will revolve the dial to a greater degree: "The VPU/NPU with Lunar Lake brings more significant changes with the open-source driver changes already underway there. With Lunar Lake is the new VPU4 IP and the Linux 6.6 kernel with its updated IVPU driver already has initial support there."