I'm studying JIT design with regard to dynamic languages VM implementation. I haven't done much Assembly since the 8086/8088 days, just a little here or there, so be nice if I'm out of sorts.

As I understand it, the x86 (IA-32) architecture still has the same basic limited register set today that it always did, but the internal register count has grown tremendously, but these internal registers are not generally available and are used with register renaming to achieve parallel pipelining of code that otherwise could not be parallelizable. I understand this optimization pretty well, but my feeling is, while these optimizations help in overall throughput and for parallel algorithms, the limited register set we are still stuck with results in more register spilling overhead such that if x86 had double, or quadruple the registers available to us, there may be significantly less push/pop opcodes in a typical instruction stream? Or are there other processor optmizations that also optimize this away that I am unaware of? Basically if I've a unit of code that has 4 registers to work with for integer work, but my unit has a dozen variables, I've got potentially a push/pop for every 2 or so instructions.

Any references to studies, or better yet, personal experiences?