Qwen 3.8 27B Reverse-Engineered Firmware From an Early-2000s ARM Point-of-Sale Terminal That Opus 4 Could Not

r/LocalLLaMA (113 upvotes), also covered at xda-developers.com/qwen-3-8-27b-reverse-engineering-job-frontier-model/ and cross-posted to r/singularity (556 upvotes)·medium signalXBlueskyLinkedInCopy link

A practitioner who previously benchmarked Qwen 3.8 against 3.6 on an HTML Galaga port deliberately moved to a task with no plausible training-data contamination: firmware and software preservation and emulation for an early 2000s ARM-based POS system. Running UD-Q8_K_XL on two RTX 3090s under llama-server with Opencode, the local model completed work he says Opus 4 could not, and the post got picked up by XDA Developers the same day. A commenter with 80 upvotes independently reported running an abliterated Qwen 3.8 alongside DeepSeek V4 Pro and headless Ghidra for binary analysis, which is a second data point that this model is unusually strong at non-x86 reverse engineering.