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Hello,
At a high level, I am wondering if it is possible to use the Arrow Lake NPU 3720 to do general purpose compute. For example, is it possible to use the NPU for high performance matrix multiplication operations using data from some other PCIe device, for example a network card or image sensor?
If I could direct attention to this doc: linux-npu-driver/docs/overview.md at main · intel/linux-npu-driver · GitHub
... at what level could I leverage the NPU to do this sort of general purpose compute? I believe the level zero loader can do the memory management roughly speaking, but the npu compiler itself sits below this level, leading me to believe there is a special API in openVino or calls directly in the user mode driver tests. If I want to use the NPU as generally as possible, must I use openVino, or can I write a custom program like the user mode driver tests, or some other option?
Thanks
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Hello
The Arrow Lake NPU (Network Processing Unit) is designed primarily for high-performance tasks such as AI inference, networking, and media processing. While it is optimized for these types of workloads, it is generally not designed for arbitrary, general-purpose compute in the same way a CPU or GPU would be used. However, it’s possible to repurpose NPUs like the Arrow Lake NPU for certain compute-heavy tasks (such as matrix multiplication) depending on the level of abstraction you want to work at. The NPU typically provides specialized processing capabilities that can be leveraged for specific operations like matrix multiplications, which are common in machine learning and AI workloads
For matrix operations, particularly in high-performance computing, it’s important to use the right frameworks and interfaces. NPUs like the Arrow Lake NPU often integrate with frameworks like OpenVINO to provide a higher-level API for utilizing the hardware effectively.
-bruce

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