Well some translation is going on at the front end, but all the work should be RISC.

From my understanding RISC is just made up of small simple commands that you can speed up and pipeline, while CISC used larger more complex blocks that you had to deal with in specific order.

To keep compatability with the old desgins you needed a chip that handled the older code, so a translating unit seems to have been the smart thing to do.

Under a microscope a new CPU core probably looks alot different then a 386 one.