Batching packets bring several benefits:

  - amortizing cache misses are you mentioned

  - better use of out-of-order, superscalar processors: by processing multiple independent packets in parallel, the processor can fill more execution units

  - enable the use of vector instructions (SSE/AVX, VMX etc): again, processing multiple independent packets in parallel means you can leverage SIMD. SIMD instructions are used pervasively in VPP