The process took 1 day. I interviewed at NVIDIA (Santa Clara, CA) in Oct 2010
Interview
My interview with Nvidia consisted of a phone interview, a programming test, being flown out for a day of interviews on-site, and then being flown back out to interview with a second team.
I applied for the job through a friend who works there. After interviewing with his manager I was asked to complete a programming question via e-mail within 30 minutes and send him the response. This question was designed to test my knowledge of memory management and the C programming language.
All arrangements were simple and handled over e-mail with the recruiting coordinator. They made a reservation for the rental car, hotel, and airline tickets, and I had to pay and submit the hotel and rental car for reimbursement along with gas and meal charges.
I interviewed with 7 people during my first trip out and was asked a variety of technical questions from programming, to systems architecture questions. I was also given a wide opportunity to learn about the company, the product I would be working on, and what the culture is like at Nvidia.
I was declined an offer from this team based primarily on the time frame that I would be available on and the fact that they were looking for someone to start almost immediately and to ramp up quickly, but I received an offer to interview with a second team within the company that was much more established.
For my second interview I met with 3 individuals from the new team and it was very similar to the first time. Plenty of technical questions and opportunity to ask about other aspects of the company.
I would highly recommend you be familiar with C, developing on multi-core systems, and have a very good base in UNIX systems programming.
Interview questions [5]
Question 1
Implement a linked list structure and insert routine in C.
Make it thread safe.
Implement a function for compare and swap in C. Use this function to implement linked list insertion. How could you take advantage of hardware caching to implement this.
The process took 4 weeks. I interviewed at NVIDIA in Nov 2009
Interview
The first phone interview was a basic screening. They spoke a bit about the kind of work they do and what an intern would be expected to do. The same evening I got mail asking me my schedule for second interview. The second interviewer had a bad accent and I could hardly understand anything. Had to keep reconfirming about what he actually asked. Many of my friends who interviewed also faced this problem. He asked questions about embedded systems and after 3 weeks got a reject.(So did all those who interviewed with him from my school that Fall)