AMD says XDNA1 Linux LLM support isn't available. I used AI-assisted development to get a full transformer layer running on a Ryzen 7 8845HS NPU.

I've been experimenting with the NPU in my Ryzen 7 8845HS laptop (Hawk Point / XDNA1) on Fedora Linux.

A lot of the current AMD Ryzen AI documentation focuses on XDNA2 hardware, and community projects like FastFlowLM don't currently support XDNA1. I was curious whether the hardware was actually incapable of running LLM workloads on Linux, or if the software support had simply moved on.

Full disclosure: I used ChatGPT and Codex heavily throughout this project. I am not an AI compiler engineer and I couldn't have done this without AI-assisted code investigation, debugging and porting work.

The rough progression was:

• Verified the NPU was working through amdxdna
• Investigated older RyzenAI-SW releases
• Found public Phoenix/XDNA1 artifacts (1x4.xclbin, qlinear_2, transaction binaries)
• Built the modern Linux XRT/XDNA userspace stack
• Got AMD's old Phoenix GEMM transactions executing on Linux
• Validated 24 transformer-relevant GEMM shapes
• Validated real quantized int4/BF16 inference paths
• Built a reusable Linux XDNA1QLinear wrapper
• Executed a complete synthetic Llama-2-style transformer layer

Current status:

• Quantized int4 weights
• BF16 activations
• Q/K/V/O projections on the NPU
• MLP projections on the NPU
• RMSNorm, RoPE, attention and activation functions on CPU
• Deterministic repeatable results
• No Windows involved

Some interesting numbers:

• ~6 ms per transformer layer (warm)
• ~116 MiB resident memory per layer
• 8-layer test stack completed successfully
• Memory scaling appears linear
• No kernel/XRT leaks observed so far

What I have not done:

• No real model weights yet
• No llama.cpp integration
• No token generation
• No end-to-end LLM inference

At this point it looks less like a hardware limitation and more like an engineering project. The old XDNA1 path appears to still be functional under Linux when paired with the modern amdxdna stack.

I'm mostly posting because I couldn't find many examples of people doing anything substantial with XDNA1 NPUs on Linux, and I thought others might find it interesting.

If there's interest, I'm happy to clean up the code and publish the project on GitHub.