It looks like there is a big increase of frame size in JDK 8. 
For testing I use simple program, which measures a deep of recursion:

public class StackOverflow {
    static int level;
    
    public static void main(String[] args) {
        try {
            new StackOverflow().recurse();
        } catch (StackOverflowError e) {
            System.out.println("Final Level "+level+" for JDK "+System.getProperty("java.version"));
        }
        
    }
    
    void recurse() {
        level++;
        if (level%100 == 0) System.out.println("Level "+level);
        recurse();
    }
    
}

There is a infinite recursion and the program measures how deep it can go before StackOverflowError happened. Interesting thing is that there is a big difference between JDK 7 and JDK 8. I am running the test on solaris sparc using 64bit JDK with fixed stack size Xss2M - to rule out different stack size defaults. Here are the results of command "binaries/solaris-sparcv9/bin/java -Xss2M -jar StackOverflow.jar" for different JDKs:
JDK 1.6.0_65-b14    15992
JDK 1.7.0_60-b19    15991
JDK 1.8.0-b132          4914
JDK 1.8.0_20-ea-b19 4843
JDK 1.9.0-ea-b18       4843

There is a significant difference between JDK 7 and JDK 8. It looks like this regression happened sometime after JDK 1.8.0-ea-b101, since this build still returns 15050. Similar regression can be observed on other platforms (Linux, Mac OS X) although it is not that big as on solaris/sparc.