This could be very useful to run really old PC tied commercial and industrial equipment. There is a surprising amount of old systems still keeping our lives running in small niche ways. It could be:
looks like the implemented CPU (ULi M6117C) supports a coprocessor interface, so it is entirely possible that a 387sx equivalent could give it floating point capabilities. it's probably not electrically implemented on this specific device to expose the interface though. otherwise yeah no FP sucks
While an FPU (Floating Point Unit aka math coprocessor) would be nice, the 386SX is still a 16-bit CPU. The 386DX is a 32-bit CPU (and would still need a 387 for a dedicated FPU). In the 486 line SX meant no FPU, while DX meant FPU inside.
ahhh fuck I forgot about that little stupid memory bus cheat that Intel pulled. they've been good at obfuscating their screwing of consumers thru weird naming schemes ever since they started lol
Of the many oddities you can buy from Aliexpress, some of the weirdest are the recreations of retro computer systems in semi-modern designs.
We're most intimately familiar with the Book 8088, a recreation of the original 1981 IBM PC inside a chunky clamshell laptop.
The people behind the Book 8088 are also responsible for the Hand386, which is a bit like a late-80s PC stuck inside an old Palm Pilot or Blackberry, and a second revision of the Book 8088 with more built-in ports and a VGA-capable graphics adapter installed instead of a basic CGA adapter.
Whoever is selling these systems is now back with the Pocket 386, which combines Hand386-style internals with a clamshell design similar to the Book 8088.
The system also includes 8MB of RAM, one of three different replaceable VGA adapters (either a Cirrus Logic CL-GD542X, a TVGA9000i, or a CHIPS F655x5), a Yamaha OPL3 sound card, an 800x480 IPS display panel, a 4,000 mAh battery, and a CompactFlash slot for storage.
But even running off of a CompactFlash card instead of an ancient spinning HDD, expect Windows 95 support to be slow at best, particularly because of the technically inferior 386SX processor and the still-pretty-scanty 8MB of memory.
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The point is not power but hardware compatibility. Emulation only goes so far and many, if not most, weird esoteric hardware systems from the 90s depended on idiosyncracies and strange usage of standard busses and weird interactions of the CPU. Emulation almost always breaks this.
also most of those USB adapters likely won't support true hardware switch interrupts, Direct Memory Access, or raw bus control to talk to other cards, which almost every special ISA card actually needs at least one of these to function.
