Following from PHP.net, the development team had just released PHP 7 on December 03, 2015.
The new version includes some new features which include:
- Improved performance: PHP 7 is up to twice as fast as PHP 5.6
- Significantly reduced memory usage
- Abstract Syntax Tree
- Consistent 64-bit support
- Improved Exception hierarchy
- Many fatal errors converted to Exceptions
- Secure random number generator
- Removed old and unsupported SAPIs and extensions
- The null coalescing operator
- Return and Scalar Type Declarations
- Anonymous Classes
- Zero cost asserts
For source downloads of PHP 7, you can get the installer on their downloads page and Windows binaries can be found on windows.php.net/download/.
As a developer, I would not recommend you guys in jumping in and update the version right away because there are updates in the engine which will break a lot of your applications. You may be using different types of libraries which are not compatible to the current version but if you are interested in checking out the Migration Guide, it is available in the PHP Manual.
I recommend that you check first PHP 7 on a development environment before migrating.
Kudos to the PHP Development team for releasing this awesome version!
