They expose the x86 instruction set externally for compatibility, but translate it to a different instruction set internally. It is conceivable that you could have instead translate 68k instructions and the rest of the CPU would have remained the same.
It used to be an architectural distinction but now it's just marketing, if even that much.
When PowerPC started adding complex vector instructions (AltiVec) and the Pentium turned x86 into a RISC core with translation layer around it you knew the distinction was pretty much dead.
Older x86 hardware is incredibly cheap and plentiful in my experience. Of course stuff goes up in price as it ages and gets rarer, but that's just expected.
Since I started writing software professionally over ten years ago x86 was the only instruction set that mattered outside of a few niche domains. Now it's all but irrelevant in the fastest growing market. For those of us that have lived in the shadow of Wintel our entire professional lives the last few years have seen some dizzying changes.
So the big picture for me is that developments in x86 are now minor news.
Even weirder, x86 is only a superficial layer - all x86 code has been compiled to RISC on-the-fly since the 1990s. This is an economic artifact of the unpredicted success of the IBM PC.
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