It's all just a guessing game right now but on Wednesday the European Commission is expected to levy a capital fine on Intel of somewhere between $600 million and $1.6 billion, possibly the largest single penalty the EC regulators have ever exacted, more than the combined fines Microsoft had to pay.

Bloomberg, however, says the EC uses 2006 guidelines to calculate fines and that the formula could be 30% of Intel's European sales last year or $2.1 billion times the number of years that the violations have existed.

The EC has been investigating Intel since 2001.

It is unclear whether the 2006 rules mean, as in the past, that the EC can't demand more than 10% of a company's annual worldwide revenue. Intel last year did $37.6 billion and it has $7.8 billion in the bank.

In the cockamamie way they do things in Brussels it is still unclear what Intel will ultimately be found guilty of since the EC is believed to have edited its secret charges - still expected to be long and involved - to survive an appeal. Even Intel doesn't know how the final indictment will read but it will appeal any adverse decision.

The company has already claimed in court that the EC wouldn't accept evidence that would have vindicated it and the Court of First Instance told Intel to argue the point on appeal.

The EC is also expected to restrict Intel's allegedly anticompetitive business practices of using rebates, which the EC claims have severely retarded AMD's growth and Intel claims are just a form of volume discounts that benefits the consumer.

Intel has also been accused to paying OEMs not to do business with AMD at all to the point of insisting that OEMs cancel the launch of AMD-based machines. And it was also supposed to have sold chips below cost to Dell and HP.

AMD, where Wednesday might be a paid holiday, expects to leverage the EC's findings in its own antitrust case against Intel in the US. It goes to trial next year and there's a pretty penny at stake.

AMD may also finally be able to entice the Justice Department into investigating Intel, a feat that has so far eluded it though it did get Intel in Dutch with regulators in Korea and Japan as well as Brussels.

The new head of the DOJ's Antitrust Division Christine Varney, appointed by the Obama White House, expects to "restore an aggressive enforcement policy against corporations that use their market dominance to elbow out competitors or keep them from gaining market share," according to a speech she gave Monday morning that was first reported by the New York Times.

The policies of the Bush administration, which interpreted antitrust law differently, are supposed to have pushed the little guy to complain to the EC and regulators in the Far East.

Varney has officially rescinded the Bush guidelines for courts and private litigants memorialized in a 215-page report written by the DOJ last year that supposedly made cases involving monopoly and predatory practices hard to bring.