Yeah, so refactored PHP makes a PHP app 20% faster.
But you might actually not like to hear Node's V8 engine is between 50 and 150 times faster than PHP in synthetic benchmarks, and about 20 times faster in more diversified applications (as long as they don't sit an eternity blocking waiting on a DB call which is the way people did web apps 10 years ago). That's 2000% faster than PHP, just so we use the same units here.
I'm very happy PHP is getting faster and all, but just don't juxtapose it next to JS engines (which the article talks about), let alone something more serious like the JVM, because the "bright future" of PHP starts looking quite dim in comparison.
It depends, for things like Web Sockets Node.js is really good. But for other things, HHVM (Facebook's HipHop JIT) and the new PHP 5.7 dev with JIT are really fast.
HHVM and now PHP 5.7-dev, both with JIT - the future of PHP looks bright.
Starting a new project, we would choose PHP, Node.js or Go according to the requirements.