English

NITRO: LLM Inference on Intel Laptop NPUs

Computation and Language 2024-12-17 v1 Artificial Intelligence

Abstract

Large Language Models (LLMs) have become essential tools in natural language processing, finding large usage in chatbots such as ChatGPT and Gemini, and are a central area of research. A particular area of interest includes designing hardware specialized for these AI applications, with one such example being the neural processing unit (NPU). In 2023, Intel released the Intel Core Ultra processor with codename Meteor Lake, featuring a CPU, GPU, and NPU system-on-chip. However, official software support for the NPU through Intel's OpenVINO framework is limited to static model inference. The dynamic nature of autoregressive token generation in LLMs is therefore not supported out of the box. To address this shortcoming, we present NITRO (NPU Inference for Transformers Optimization), a Python-based framework built on top of OpenVINO to support text and chat generation on NPUs. In this paper, we discuss in detail the key modifications made to the transformer architecture to enable inference, some performance benchmarks, and future steps towards improving the package. The code repository for NITRO can be found here: https://github.com/abdelfattah-lab/nitro.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2412.11053,
  title  = {NITRO: LLM Inference on Intel Laptop NPUs},
  author = {Anthony Fei and Mohamed S. Abdelfattah},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2412.11053},
  year   = {2024}
}

Comments

11 pages, 7 figures

R2 v1 2026-06-28T20:35:37.082Z