In fast network processing on PC hardware, you process interrupts of NIC on a single core, automatically. That NIC is DMAing the data which you can poll and deq

In fast network processing on PC hardware, you process interrupts of NIC on a single core, automatically. That NIC is DMAing the data which you can poll and dequeue from memory via multiple consumer ring buffers. You have a single master core and N worker cores. If you go for performance and decide to dumb poll without any yields the system will be lightning fast (and max out your CPU usage) But (as mentioned in reply above) good Ethernet cards have way less inherent I/O latency than USB input device<->HDMI screen chain. So, I see the solution in a PCIx graphics card that can generate VGA signal and take PS/2 input via poll mode drivers. If you connect "real" peripherals to it you can go low-latency, if you connect HDMI/USB stuff via adapters you'll have arbitrary latency.