I've done some work with DPDK about a year ago. At that time I was getting about 12us latency for small packets. Interestingly the power consumption is maximum

I've done some work with DPDK about a year ago. At that time I was getting about 12us latency for small packets. Interestingly the power consumption is maximum at minimum load. DPDK uses poll mode drivers to minimize latency, when load is light it uses more power constantly polling than the cpu uses doing computations.