The PR guy from the US was in charge of the Intel integrated RAID BNU31 controller. Although it was out of my league (being SCSI and all), I checked it out anyway because it looked rather interesting.

Here are the specs of this RAID controller :-

• Intel i960 RN I/O processor
• 64-bit PCI connector
• RAID levels 0, 1, 5 and 10
• 1 channel UltraSCSI-160 support (160MB/s)
• Online RAID level migration and capacity expansion without need to reboot
• Online array roaming
• Instant availability and background initialization
• Automatic rebuild with global hot spares
• Variable stripe size per volume
• SCSI disk pass-through to host OS
• Selectable boot volume or SCSI disk
• 32-128MB of ECC SDRAM (!!!)
• Full and Sequential Write-Back Caching selectable per volume
• SAF-TE enclosure support
• Hot-Plug drive support

Intel's BNU31 Integrated RAID Controller

You might be thinking wow! but if you read Intel's product overview on it, you will realize that this RAID controller was designed for entry-level and mid-range servers and workstations. Now, if RAID support is already quite common (in numerous motherboards, including ABIT's BX133 and KT7-RAID), I can imagine future motherboards running a RAID controller that offers similar performance but with IDE compatibility, of course. :)

Dell PowerEdge 4400 Server

Check out the demo machine that Intel used to show off the RAID controller chip. It was the Dell PowerEdge 4400 server.

No, I'm not advertising the Dell PowerEdge 4400 server. But it looked really interesting and besides, if you have some time and the right tools, you can even try to modify your cases to implement certain useful features found in the PowerEdge server.

No. That's not the Celeron (Hey! What would a Celeron be doing in a server???).
It's Intel's i960 RN I/O processor

Here's a picture of the PowerEdge's motherboard.
Note the huge heatsinks for the dual P!!! Xeon processors and the eight (8!!) DIMM slots!
The green slots are 64-bit PCI slots btw...