So according to that "specification" no optimization is allowed. Since that would almost always change the "heating behavior" of code. Therefore, it is absurd.
None at all, even out of order execution. For that matter, executing the same code on different hardware is right out. Every program must be implemented on single-purpose hardware, and you can't even manufacture two of them.
Yet the compiler writers care only about the language spec, and you can bet that failing to optimize this as dead code would be considered a compiler bug.
This goes not only for Java compiler, but many other languages as well.
What would "leave alone" even be? There's no "default" state of performance of Java code; it would be ridiculously stupid for there to be something saying that, say, "a+b" for int type values has to take at least 1 nanosecond or something. And you can't use big O complexity here either - the int type has a maximum of 2 billion, and thus a loop over it is trivially O(1), just with a potentially-big constant factor. (or, alternatively, the loop was sped up by a constant factor of 2 billion, and optimizing compilers should extremely obviously be allowed to optimize code by a constant factor)
No, that code has no side effects. The implementation is free to produce whatever side effects it wants or needs as part of execution, but that is absolutely none of the compiler's business.