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Intel Neural Processing Unit (NPU) with ESXi

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Starting with Intel Meteor Lake (14th Generation) CPUs, now part of the new Intel Core Ultra Processor (Series 1) brand, an integrated Neural Processing Unit or NPU is built right into the SoC (system-on-chip) and is optimized for low power AI Inferencing.


I found this article from Chips and Cheese about the new Intel Meteor Lake NPU to be super insightful, definitely recommend a read if you are new to NPUs.

While you can already consume the Intel integrated graphics (iGPU) in platforms like the Intel NUC with ESXi for workload inferencing, I was curious on whether this new Intel NPU could actually be used by ESXi? 🤔

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Quick Tip - NVMe Tiering configured but not working?

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Since publishing my NVMe Tiering in vSphere 8.0 Update 3 is a Homelab game changer blog post, the feedback and responses have been absolutely phenomenal!

In fact, during VMware Explore, I had a number of users share with me in person that they not only updated to vSphere 8.0 Update 3 after learning about the feature but they were extremely happy that they could have their hardware was even more capable with just a software upgrade and workloads varied from general infrastructure VMs to the full VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) stack.

Right before VMware Explore, I did have a couple of users who reported that after successfully configuring NVMe Tiering and rebooting their ESXi host, they noticed the memory capacity did not change. After sharing the details along with vm-support bundles, Engineering has identified the root cause.

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