> that's great, you've written a very fast driver. My benchmarks are comparing psycopg2 to itself,

OK, I ran the asyncio suite (with uvloop event loop):

Python3.5.2 asyncio+psycopg+uvloop -- avg 8356.84 recs/sec

Really not that slower. There is also an important detail that you forget to mention: the threaded benchmark uses notably more CPU time (about 30% more).