I don't think this'll hurt too badly
I don't think this'll hurt too badly. Don't get me wrong, I think NVidia ARM merger would have been good for both, they both have excellent engineers that could have done even more working together.
But, they both have excellent engineers seperately too; ARM is making plenty of money and I don't think they're cash constrained from doing what they want; NVidia isn't either, they'll have to keep paying for an ARM license but the $40 billion they're not spending buying ARM will buy many years of licenses. ARM licensees are pretty much free to do what they want ARM-wise, using ARM designs "off-the-shelf", modifying these ARM designs, or designing some ARM-compatible chip totally from scratch.
Apple's developed the M1, NVidia I'm sure NVidia can also make a nice high-speed ARM, the existing NVidia ARM stuff is already no slouch. I had a Acer Chromebook with a Tegra K1 and it was no slouch; 22 hour battery life.. 12 if I ran video encodes on it. It'd run ffmpeg to do some h.264 encoding and that NEON instruction set would get it running at a good 2-3x the performance of my (admittedly elderly) Core i5-750 (and this was using an older "ARMv7" 32-bit ARM, not 64-bit ARM8 which is a fair bit faster at number crunching. It was pretty cool, I used Chrubuntu to get Ubuntu on it, held back the X packages and kernel (because it had a binary NVidia driver) and ugraded to more-current Ubuntu version, and I had an up-to-date Ubuntu with full Nvidia drivers, even CUDA worked on it, 192 cores. It ran about dead even with a GTX650 while using about 5 watts of power (max ed out CPU cores & GPU altogether was about 10 watts) Unfortuantely since it was like $190 it was definitely "built to spec", after about 2 years the battery, touchpad, power connector, and keyboard all started acting up within a matter of weeks of each other. Oh well, back to a normal notebook with a few hours battery life.