The next major release of PHP is to be called PHP7 in order to avoid confusion with the now-defunct PHP6 unicode initiative. PHP 7.0 is likely to be released by the end of 2015 per the PHP7 timeline. If the release candidates begin on time starting in June, we could be looking at the official PHP 7.0 release around October of this year. However, it’s largely dependent upon the state of affairs at that point with the quality of the code.
The biggest feature of PHP 7 is the performance improvements due to major work on its Zend Engine, which will be Zend Engine 3 with PHP 7.