Intel's OpenVINO toolkit for optimizing and deploying AI inferencing across their range of hardware platforms is out with its newest quarterly feature update. There is official support for Intel's latest hardware as well as enabling more large language models and other new AI innovations for this excellent open-source Intel software project.

OpenVINO 2026.1 continues tacking on more GenAI features. For both CPU and GPU execution, OpenVINO 2026.1 now supports Qwen3 VL. On the CPU side there is also GPT-OSS 120B support.

As a preview feature for OpenVINO 2026.1 is an OpenVINO back-end for Llama.cpp. Upstream llama.cpp already has a SYCL back-end for Intel GPUs and more while now an OpenVINO back-end is being worked . This OpenVINO back-end for Llama.cpp will enable optimized inference across Intel CPUs, GPUs, and NPUs. Quite an exciting addition for once this back-end is maturing should open up Llama.cpp for Intel Core Ultra NPU usage and more.

"Preview: Introducing the OpenVINO backend for llama.cpp, which enables optimized inference on Intel CPUs, GPUs, and NPUs. Validated on GGUF models such as Llama-3.2-1B-Instruct-GGUF, Phi-3-mini-4k-instruct-gguf, Qwen2.5-1.5B-Instruct-GGUF, and Mistral-7B-Instruct-v0.3."

OpenVINO 2026.1 also comes with official support for Wildcat Lake SoCs as well as the recently-launched Intel Arc Pro B70 32GB graphics card.

Downloads and more details on the OpenVINO 2026.1 release via GitHub . I'll have out updated OpenVINO benchmarks soon.