We read with great interest Wednesday’s news about the record $1.45 billion fine levied against Intel by the European Commission for violating antitrust legislation. By giving rebates to PC makers buying Intel chips and urging them to drop products using other CPU brands, Intel maintained an unfair competitive advantage over the competition (namely AMD), according to regulators.

Years of appeals are doubtlessly ahead, but even if Intel ends up with a worst-case scenario, the company at least has booming Netbook CPU sales to fall back on, thanks to the popular Atom processor.

Doing a little back-of-the-envelope math, we figured out how many Atom-powered Netbooks it would take to cover this billion-plus fine.