php 7 is just as fast, or a teeny bit slower, than 5. Isn't that a rather interesting result, given how the php community has claimed huge performance increases in 7?
That's why I loathe TechEmpower's benchmark, or any similar service trying to benchmark the world. It's very misleading and error prone by nature. It's not like you're comparing two GPU cards doing the same thing.
Take PHP for example, one of the most popular frameworks is using version 4.2 (latest is 5.2, and there's also a LTS release). It was released in June, 2014 and it's before several major architecture changes and refactoring. And they'll probably say it's my fault for not contributing.