A friend of a friend was asked to implement sqrt in hardware during a phone interview with nVidia. If you're smart enough to do that and you can't maintain the equivalent of a 2.7 GPA then that betrays a poor work ethic.
I think their interview's might be a little uneven. I was asked how to swap the values of two registers in hardware and I said something about muxes and lines. When the interviewer sounded skeptical I started expounding on different types of latches and their properties. In retrospect I think they wanted the xor trick, but that's really a firmware or software thing. Needless to say I didn't get the real interview.
Or far more interesting questions abound than the ones in your "Communications 101" class. (Also, top 80%+ isn't the same thing as a 2.7 GPA - completely different systems.)
