Funny how the "validation time" has increased dramatically going from SB-E to IVB-E.
The same thing happened with successive Itanium iterations, and I doubt there were any nefarious reasons why that happened.
It is true that more complex designs required more thorough vetting before you can hope to build any confidence with the target demographic (server/HPC buyers) that the new stuff isn't going to turn the buyer into a beta tester.
In consumer markets we might be willing to be beta testers on early hardware because a random system reboot doesn't make the difference between losing a key account and not paying our bills. We can always reboot and log back into WoW.
Remember that TLB bug that AMD had after their initial B2 stepping release of Barcelona? That is the kind of stuff that keeps people up at night worrying that if they buy the latest and greatest in hardware then it will bite them in the ass on the weekend when they are out of the office.
Validation time is expanding because ISA's are expanding and the risk is ever increasing. As a systems seller you must demonstrate to your customers that you are doing what it takes to prove out the platform, cpu included, and there simply are no acceptable shortcuts for that demographic.