Intel Releases OpenVINO 2026.1 With Llama.cpp Backend and New Hardware Support

Summary

Intel has released OpenVINO 2026.1, which introduces a backend for llama.cpp, the widely-used open-source LLM inference framework, along with support for new hardware platforms. OpenVINO is Intel's toolkit for optimizing and deploying AI inference workloads across Intel CPUs, GPUs, and NPUs. The addition of a llama.cpp backend is notable because it bridges Intel's inference optimization stack with one of the most popular community-driven frameworks for running large language models locally. Thi