I got a phone interview the other day directly from a current employee from their CPU group. He asked me about the basic concepts in computer architecture and it was not very hard. Also, he asked a lot about work experiences showed on my resume.
I applied through university. The process took 3 weeks. I interviewed at Marvell Technology (San Jose, CA) in Feb 2016
Interview
My resume was referred to CPU group through an alumni from umich. Around 1 months after I submitted my resume, I got an email from the hiring manager. He asked me what was the good day for the phone interview. The phone interview took half an hour. One logic engineer asked me some basic questions about 5 stage in order pipeline and something about my resume. After 2 weeks came the invitation for onsite interviewIt. It took half day for meeting 5 people. Each interviewer spent ~ 30 minutes and asked ~ 5 questions. Each interviewer asked questions in the different areas.
Interview questions [2]
Question 1
Do we need PC to index second level table of branch predictor (i.e. pattern history table)? Why? What if bits of PC more than bits to index to pattern history table?
I applied online. I interviewed at Marvell Technology
Interview
Heard about job openings through a friend that was contacted by a recruiter. E-mailed my resume to the recruiter and was invited for short on-site interviews with two different teams: CPU logic design and SoC verification. I was only brought on-site for the first step because I was living in Santa Clara at the time.
After the two interviews, I was later invited back for a full day of on-site interviews with the CPU team. I interviewed with 5 different members of the CPU team. I thought I did really well with the interviews but it still took Marvell weeks to get back to me with an official offer.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Questions were related to logic design and computer architecture. With a good understanding of pipeline design and out-of-order execution principles the questions were not too hard. The only question that I couldn't really solve was about the design of a scalable, fair arbiter. Expect questions about out-of-order execution algorithms, state machine design, and logic optimization.
