I applied through a recruiter. The process took 8 weeks. I interviewed at Apple (Cupertino, CA) in Feb 2015
Interview
Was first contaced by HR to schedule a phone technical interview. All Technical questions were pretty straight forward based on the job description. Did a bit of brush up on a few things
I applied online. The process took 4 weeks. I interviewed at Apple (Cupertino, CA) in Dec 2014
Interview
I applied to a job posting on their website and was contacted about a week later by a recruiter. Then there was one phone interview, about 30 minutes, with some general questions about my current job and work experience - nothing too technical. The actual on-site interview was a lot more difficult, some basic digital logic design problems, and principles like setup/hold time, metastability, etc. I met with 6 different interviewers plus one more at lunch. Thought it went relatively well, except for a few more analog circuit related questions I had no clue about. Then heard back that there was no offer about 3 weeks later.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Describe how a multi bit synchronizer / async fifo handles the variable delay of each bit
I applied through college or university. The process took 1 day. I interviewed at Apple (Pittsburgh, PA) in Oct 2015
Interview
On Campus interview, basically it is a total review about the computer architecture ranging from superscalar structure to multi-core processors. In the morning is the first screen, then they offer you an interview in the afternoon. The total interview length is 30 mins. It is a 1 on 1 interview. It is not very questions-oriented. We broadly talked about the cache hierarchy, virtual address, register renaming, branch prediction, load/store bypassing/forwarding, memory coherence in multi-core processors, the basic structure of multi-core processor and a lot of details in processor designs. The interview in general is pretty relaxed. You could draw a lot of figures to help the interviewer to understand your point.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Q: Why do we need brach prediction?
Q: Detailed description about the cache address structures
Q: Out-of-Order superscalar processor structure