Yes, the address unit handles the shift+add (both on x86 and ARM). That everything is translated into RISC-like "microcode" is a bit of a meme, it was only rea

Yes, the address unit handles the shift+add (both on x86 and ARM). That everything is translated into RISC-like "microcode" is a bit of a meme, it was only really true for the first generation 8086/8088 (from 1978). Those early chips actually had microcode subroutines to compute for example BX+DI and move the result into an internal address register. But every following x86 generation did it in hardware. Modern CPUs with out-of-order execution do break read/modify/write instructions into separate micro-ops however.