It’s been a tough day or two for Intel. Yesterday Intel CEO Paul Otellini told investors that the market outlook was better than expected, and that Intel predicted growth in the all-in-one PC space that, along with Intel Atom powered nettops would help the desktop PC market grow a bit. But at the same time, IDC was reporting that Intel Atom shipments fell 33 percent during the quarter. And that helped rival AMD pick up more than 4 percent of the market share previously held by Intel.

Right now, the PC processor race is sort of a two company game, with occasional entries from smaller companies like VIA. It should be interesting to watch this rivalry more closely later this year as a sea of netbooks powered by ARM processors are expected to hit the market. I don’t expect them to make a huge dent, but netbooks do represent the fastest growing segment of the PC industry, so if ARM can take a significant portion of the netbook chip market away from Intel, these processors could make a little dent.

Oh, and to top things off, the European Commission issued a $1.45 billion fine against Intel today for antitrust violations. Intel allegedly paid PC makers to “postpone, cancel, or avoid” AMD products. An appeal is likely.

Update: CNet did some math and determined that Intel would have to sell over 27 million Atom CPUs to make up for this $1.45 billion fine.