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"The former needed two 16 core servers just to process I/O and deserialize the messages; the latter used 1 core on a single server."

I'm genuinely curious; what was the 'former' protocol? Was it encoded using FAST or zlib or something?

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I would guess FIX/FAST. For a concrete example, have a read of the specifications for Eurex's market data protocols:

http://www.eurexchange.com/exchange-en/technology/t7/system-...

Specifically, compare the Enhanced Market Data Interface protocol (described in "T7 Market and Reference Data Interfaces") and the Enhanced Order Book Interface protocol. EMDI is FAST, a morass of tags, stop bits, presence bitmaps, and who knows what else (i don't). EOBI is structs.

I was consuming the feed in question via an API provided by the vendor and didn't have direct knowledge of the wire protocol, but based on how it was described to me during the sales process it was probably either FAST or a proprietary protocol with a similar design.

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