Recently on a flight I sat next to a Ph.D. that ran a chip design consulting firm. In this fascinating discussion, he talked about the internal design of AMD and Intel processors and said exactly this. AMD and Intel haven't had hardware based x86 computation for a very long time.

Instead, they have a RISC style pipeline with an op-code translation layer that decodes instructions into smaller RISC-like instructions that get run through the pipeline.

So really, modern x86 processors are more like x86-compatible processors.