PHP 5.7 gets refactored core, is 10%-30% faster than PHP 5.5! Wow!
What an announcement! The awesome PHP core guys have refactored the Zend Engine (which drives PHP) and could successfully speed up real world applications dramatically with this: WordPress get 20% more performance, Drupal 11%, a Zend Framework test application even 30% more speed. Wow, excellent job!
More info here on the PHPNG (“New Generation”) page (which seems to be the cleaned up PHP branch for 5.7) and for supernerds a quite deep insight into the exact refactorings inside the Zend Engine here.