x86 is also there on modern architectures to supply an abstraction that is increasingly divergent from the actual die hardware (but compatible with expectations

x86 is also there on modern architectures to supply an abstraction that is increasingly divergent from the actual die hardware (but compatible with expectations of e.g. a C compiler that already has an output target for previous x86 hardware). Modern Intel CPUs basically emulate x86; there are many layers of abstraction between individual opcodes and transistor switching.