Update, Confirmed: NVIDIA's Tom TAP Petersen Is Officially Moving On To Intel
Update, 4/1/2019: Intel Vice President Of Core And Visual Computing and GM of Visual Technologies team at Intel, Ari Rausch has confirmed Tom Petersen's arrival to their team in a recent tweet...
In addition, the Intel Graphics Twitter account is also officially welcoming TAP to the fold...
Updated, 3/30/2019:
This article has been updated with information as to where Mr. Petersen will be working next.
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
— Ari Rauch (@arirauch) April 1, 2019
We are excited and thrilled to have Tom Petersen “TAP” joining us as an Intel Fellow on our GPU team. pic.twitter.com/30f0TkPlXY
— Intel Graphics (@IntelGraphics) April 1, 2019
This article has been updated with information as to where Mr. Petersen will be working next.
NVIDIA is losing a longtime Director of Technical Marketing and Distinguished Engineer, Tom "TAP" Petersen, who announced on Friday that he had wrapped up his final day with the firm. It has not yet been publicly announced where Tom will end up or what he has planned next, though we have it on good authority he will go where other stalwarts in the graphics industry have recently gone. More on that in a moment.
Tom is a true veteran in the industry and an all around good dude. Before landing at NVIDIA in 2005, he spent the bulk of his career as a CPU designer, having worked with IBM and Motorola on the PowerPC team. He also spent some time with Broadcom after it acquired SiByte, where he was the Engineering Director for the BCM1400, an embedded quad-core multiprocessor. Tom also was one of the engineers who had a hand in NVIDIA's G-Sync technology and has around 50 technical patents to his name. In other words, he's pretty much an industry heavyweight and a critical (former) member of NVIDIA's GeForce team.
Tom was kind enough to join our humble 2.5 Geeks podcast last year to discuss NVIDIA's Turing GPU and new (at the time) GeForce RTX series graphics cards, which introduced real-time ray tracing and Deep Learning Super Sampling (DLSS) to the consumer fold. If you missed it, grab yourself a snack and a drink and check it out (above).
His departure from NVIDIA after nearly a decade and a half feels as sudden as these things ever are, and we get the sense it was not an easy decision. When you are with a company for that long, it often feels like a family, and not just a place of employment.
"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," Tom wrote on his Facebook page on Friday evening.
Looking Ahead
So, what is next for Tom? He did not say, though he did tell HotHardware's Editor-in-Chief Dave Altavilla that "We will see each other again." Bearing in mind that nothing has been publicly confirmed, we believe Tom will end up at Intel, which itself is developing a line of discrete GPUs for launch in 2020. Intel has been aggressive in poaching key technical and marketing talent, having lured AMD's former Radeon Technologies Group boss Raja Koduri to lead its graphics team.
Intel also snagged Chris Hook, AMD's former Sr. Director of Global Product Marketing, to promote its graphics. When it was first announced that Hook was leaving AMD after nearly two decades of service, we speculated he would end up at Intel, and he did.
Other big names that have landed at Intel include Jim Keller, former lead architect at AMD who more recently served as VP of Autopilot Hardware Engineering at Tesla, and Darren McPhee, another industry veteran who at one point worked at AMD.
Though it hasn't been formally announced yet, we have gotten word from a credible source that Ari Rauch, Vice President of the Core And Visual Computing Group and General Manager of the Visual Technologies Team at Intel, has successfully recruited Tom to be an Intel Fellow working with the Game Experience Team. Bringing Tom on board would align with Intel's current strategy, which is to market the heck out of its forthcoming discrete GPU technology, its roadmap plans and to be continuously engaged with the community.
Whatever is in Tom's future, all of us at HotHardware wish him the very best.
