Long time Nvidia engineer, Tom Petersen, has spent his last day on Team GeForce… before he makes the short move across Santa Clara to take up an expected new role as Intel Fellow. Petersen made the announcement he was leaving Nvidia on his Facebook page on Friday, and the rumour coming out of Intel is that he’s coming on board as part of its push into discrete graphics next year with the Intel Xe.

Tom Petersen has been a stalwart of Nvidia, joining the company in 2005 as Director of Technical Marketing, and is one of my favourite people in the tech industry. He’s an incredibly smart, funny, and always engaging human being, able to distill some of the most complex parts of the inner workings of a GPU down into ways that even a comparative moron like me can understand.

It’s another big coup for Intel’s GPU recruitment drive, and a very trusted name in the PC hardware world. He will join up with AMD’s Chris Hook and Raja Koduri, as well as CPU heavyweight, Jim Keller, at Intel.