Yes. Tom “TAP” Petersen left NVIDIA in 2019 and joined Intel’s GPU organization. HotHardware reported the confirmation in an April 1, 2019 update, citing welcome messages attributed to Intel Graphics and Intel executive Ari Rauch.
What was confirmed
HotHardware’s April 1, 2019 update reported that Petersen joined Intel as an Intel Fellow working with the company’s Game Experience Team. The update reproduced an Intel Graphics welcome stating that Petersen was joining its GPU team, along with a message attributed to Ari Rauch, then identified as Intel’s vice president of Core and Visual Computing and general manager of Visual Technologies.
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Because the accessible record is HotHardware’s contemporaneous report and its reproductions of those messages, this confirmation is best stated as what HotHardware reported rather than as an independently verified copy of the original posts.
When Petersen left NVIDIA
HotHardware’s earlier March 30 report said Petersen had left NVIDIA while his next destination had not yet been publicly announced. The April 1 update supplied the Intel destination. Petersen said, in the farewell statement quoted by HotHardware: “Today was my last day as an NVIDIA employee. I’ll miss them. They carried me through some tough times and I am eternally grateful.”
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According to that report, March 29, 2019, was Petersen’s last day as an NVIDIA employee. The move is therefore a 2019 employment transition, not a new announcement in 2026.
What role did he take at Intel?
HotHardware described Petersen’s new position as Intel Fellow on Intel’s GPU team, working with the Game Experience Team. That title indicates a senior technical role, but the report does not establish a specific product assignment or provide a basis for predicting Intel’s later GPU strategy from this hire alone.
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- 24GB GDDR6 on 192-Bit Bus: Massive 24GB memory with 456 GB/s bandwidth – ideal for LLMs, AI inference, 3D rendering, and generative design.
- Intel Xe2-HPG Architecture: Built on Intel's next-gen architecture with 20 Xe cores and 160 XMX engines for AI acceleration (197 INT8 TOPS).
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Why the move drew attention
HotHardware’s background described Petersen as having spent nearly a decade and a half at NVIDIA after joining in 2005. The same report associated him with earlier CPU-design work, Broadcom, NVIDIA’s G-Sync technology and approximately 50 technical patents; those background details were presented by the secondary report and are not needed to establish the Intel move itself.
The contemporaneous welcome messages
Intel Graphics
HotHardware reproduced Intel Graphics as saying: “We are excited and thrilled to have Tom Petersen ‘TAP’ joining us as an Intel Fellow on our GPU team.”
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- Professional Intel Arc Pro B70 GPU: Built on the Intel Xe2-HPG architecture, it features 32 Xe cores and 256 XMX engines, designed to accelerate AI, rendering, and complex visualization workloads.
- Massive 32GB GDDR6 VRAM: Equipped with 32GB of high-speed GDDR6 memory on a 256-bit bus, running at 19 Gbps, which allows for handling large AI models and complex datasets locally.
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Ari Rauch
The article attributed this message to Ari Rauch: “So happy and thrilled to have @NVIDIA_tap the one and only Tom Petersen joining our Intel GPU team. We are going to have an awesome roadmap and oddesy ahead with @IntelGraphics”.
The wording and capitalization above follow HotHardware’s reproduction, including its spelling of “oddesy.”
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Bottom line
Tom “TAP” Petersen did leave NVIDIA for Intel. The move was confirmed by HotHardware on April 1, 2019, with Petersen reported as joining Intel’s GPU organization as an Intel Fellow working with the Game Experience Team.
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