Tweakers.net has an excellent article describing the process and tools Intel uses to bring a CPU into production. It focuses mainly on the new Penryn processor, which was designed at the Folsom campus where I used to work. I’ve worked in some of these labs (debugging chipset firmware problems), and they are just as impressive as they sound. The article also does a good job of describing the tick-tock model of design scheduling, and how various “errata” (i.e. bugs) remain in each processor. Hope you enjoy the article as much as I did.