The money sloshing around some companies is rather hard to imagine. I can wrap my poverty-stricken mind around £1 million in lottery winnings easy enough, but once you get into the billions I  have no idea what that means.

So the US Security and Exchange Commission’s 61-page document detailing the exclusivity deal between Dell and Intel made for mind-blowing reading (I suggest you start at page 10, that’s when it gets good). At one point, 76% of Dell’s quarterly operating income came from Intel, via lump sum payments and a rebate system designed to keep the PC maker from offering AMD chips in its computers.

That’s a head-turning, “that can’t be right” sort of statistic. That’s $723 million in one quarter alone. One quarter. Three months. That’s more than $8 million a day, just to keep Dell “monogamous.” I’d stay loyal for that much, that’s for sure.

Over the four years this nonsense carried on, Intel paid Dell $4.2 billion, which it used to shore up its results and stashed away into so-called “cookie jar” reserves, according to the SEC. Intel has since paid out a few billion in fines, while Dell itself agreed to a settlement of $100 million, neither admitting nor denying the charges.

The differences between those numbers are rather stark, to say the least. As I’m not really a numbers gal myself, I used a handy and free tool from IBM called Many Eyes, which creates lovely visualisations. In other words, I made a picture (click to enlarge):

The really tiny blobs clinging to the underbelly of the humongous one are the settlements paid by Dell execs, while the slightly less minuscule blob is Dell’s settlement as a company. That huge one is how much Dell made from Intel.

So were these payments a good financial move by Dell? The size difference between those blobs suggest that yes, yes it was.

The two mid-sized blobs show how much Intel paid the EU as a fine and AMD as a settlement — both record-setting amounts, but still not as much as it was willing (and able) to pay Dell to stay onside, and don’t forget that it made such payments to other manufacturers too.

It may be hard to imagine that a fine worth $100 million let alone more than $2.6 billion is a slap on the wrist, but with the money flowing through both companies – Intel posted $10.8bn in revenue and $2.9 billion in profit in the last quarter alone – such charges are small change.