> Qwen 3.8 was slower

Is that Qwen 3.8 27B? Because yes, you'd expect a plain 27B model to be better than a 24B-A2B MoE model all else being equal.

(All else isn't equal though of course - Qwen models are very, very good at coding)

Gemma-4 26BA4B would be a more similar comparison.