I think you're missing the point. He's not looking for hardware hackers. He's looking for people who know how a computer works. God job candidates should have no trouble answering that question regardless of whether they've actually ever seen a CPU bug.
"You begin to suspect that a problem you are having is due to a hardware problem, where the processor is not conforming to its specification. How would you track this down? How would you prepare a bug report for the chip manufacturer, and how would you work around the problem?"
Actually he's looking for people who know how to track down a processor bug, report it appropriately to a manufacturer, and work around it. Would it demonstrate complete incompetence and a failure of my CS education to answer: "I would learn how to track it down, learn how to submit a report, and then figure out how to work around it."?
It's one thing to expect job candidates for AdaCore to be experienced embedded-system developers, but it's another thing to expect university CS departments to throw their resources into that small corner of computer science so that he can hire new grads without having to bring them up on embedded systems work. I'm sure that CS departments with tons of resources can provide an embedded-systems track for undergraduates.
IMO the most pragmatic way to deal with the question as posed requires no knowledge of computer hardware.
If you want hardware knowledge, ask about pointer arithmetic and memory hierarchies, which is still mostly irrelevant to what most developers spend most of their time doing.
Before someone launches into a jihad about memcached and load balancing and super high-scale stuff, most people never have to do that.
Why can't they teach both - the high level reality of today, but also down to the metal (its how I did it, although the "high level" back then was miranda and pascal !).
