The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly: The Unix Legacy(herpolhode.com)

  - Too few registers
       Mostly fixed in x86_64, but still an issue if you 
       want to support 99% of the machines out there still 
       on 32 bits

  - Overlapping register classes
       This makes the register allocator's job much more
       difficult, since not only do registers interfere with
       other registers which hold the same mode of varible,
       they sometimes -- but not always -- interfere with
       other registers of the same class.

  - Irregular instructions
       If you use some registers, they're encoded
       in less bytes than others, so the optimizer/allocator
       has yet another parameter to take into account.

  - Fixed registers for integer multiplication/division
       You're forced to clobber %eax/%edx and one other reg of
       your choice. This causes more spills than it should,
       and makes the job of the register allocator harder.

  - Way too many jump variants
       I think I counted 63 variants of the instructions,
       and you can encode the same one multiple times, which
       gives you hundreds of ways of encoding a jump.

  - Complicated encoding
       First, it's a variable length encoding. You can have
       one, two, or 3 byte instruction opcodes, with various
       prefixes and suffixes.

  - Ambiguity in some cases
       Instructions can sometimes take the same initial byte
       sequences as a prefix, despite not actually having
       that prefix switched on; when decoding you have to
       figure out the rest of the instruction before you
       decide if you've got a prefix.

  - Useless Instructions (minor annoyance)
       x86 has lots (and lots) of instructions that are
       unused by compilers, are slower than simply doing
       the smaller instructions that they are composed of,
       but are still around for compatibility. Sure, it's
       needed, but do I have to like it?