It's been in for ages - I've been using it for months now, I got a fairly hefty boost in speed with Revenge of the Titans, which is mainly limited by array/buffer access checks in Java 6, and possibly float operations.
<Further clarification> The server VM in Java 7 has some seriously good bounds check hoisting in it finally but because the server VM was so miserably slow and juddery at starting up I'd never used it before for games but finally the tiered thing works and works well. Of course, it's actually more useful on the low-end machines than the high-end ones.

Cas

Java 7. Eclipse debug cmdline for Revenge at the moment:


Cas

The JSR 166y deals about it, doesn't it? Hotspot is supposed to turn your code into SIMD calls for you.

yup same here.

HotSpot does operations on single floats in SSE, not true SIMD (single instruction multiple data)

Interwebs. Just google it.

At least 3 RFEs, dead in the water:
http://bugs.sun.com/bugdatabase/view_bug.do?bug_id=6604786
http://bugs.sun.com/bugdatabase/view_bug.do?bug_id=6559557
http://bugs.sun.com/bugdatabase/view_bug.do?bug_id=6340864

Interesting article, posted today:
http://software.intel.com/en-us/articles/identifying-jvm-vectorization-simd-usage-with-the-vtunetm-performance-analyzer/
From the screenshots it's pretty obvious that the events are SCALAR not PACKED.