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I learned a bit about SSA in a compiler course. Among many other things, it is crucial for register assignment. You want to know each distinct value that will exist, and the lifetimes of those values, in order to give each a register. Then, if have more distinct values existing at one time than you have registers, you have to push stuff to the stack.

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It is not critical for register assignment -- in fact, SSA makes register assignment more difficult (see the swap problem; the lost copy problem).

Lifetime analysis is important for register assignment, and SSA can make lifetime analysis easier, but plenty of non-SSA compilers (lower-tier JIT compilers often do not use SSA because SSA is heavyweight) are able to register allocate just fine without it.

One nice thing is that it makes register assignment polynomial (the coloring of SSA variables graph is polynomial since it's not an arbitrary graph).

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