I have a lot of respect for RISC-V but I really struggle with an unqualified statement that RISC-V "is" commoditising CPUs in a meaningful way when there are basically no mobile, desktop or server chipsets with a meaningful presence in the market. All that may change over the next 10 years but who knows? For now x86 is dominant on servers and Arm in mobile.

In reality Arm commoditised in many markets CPUs by making reasonable designs available to all at reasonable cost, keeping control over the ISA and allowing firms to innovate in their implementations. You can have the same code running on a Raspberry PI, an iPhone and a 64 core Graviton2 server.

The Nvidia takeover threatens all this by giving control to a firm who could well 'unlevel' the playing field and even refuse to offer the latest IP to competitors.

RISC-V may provide a way out for firms unhappy with Nvidia but it could be a bumpy path. And its certainly not the case that Nvidia are paying $40bn to consolidate Mali with their own graphics IP.

Arm's Mali GPUs don't seem very important in the grand scheme of things. They're the choice for SoC makers who don't have anything else. Qualcomm has their own Adreno, Apple has their own thing, NXP buys GPUs from Vivante, Samsung is now going to include AMD Radeons in phones..

Sure but you have to assume that at some point in the future that Nvidia is going to start making those non-Nvidia GPUs very difficult/expensive to use in future ARM designs. They could do this legally, technically through manipulating the reference designs to tightly integrate Nvidia GPUs, cutting support for third party GPU integrating SoCs or any of the above.