[seabass-labrax]

Here's one reference: https://www.phoronix.com/news/NVIDIA-Lock-Broken

My reading of the saga is that the cryptocurrency mining bubble was causing huge demands for Nvidia GPUs as parallel processors (with ASICS for mining only starting to appear at this point). This meant that GPUs were being priced-out of the market for most PC gamers, as it was always profitable for cryptocurrency miners to buy more of them.

Nvidia introduced a lock on 'non-professional' cards which prevented alternative firmware from being loaded on them, effectively splitting the market into two, one for 'gamers' and the other for 'miners'. That lock interferes with the open source driver for Linux, Nouveau, meaning that normal things like CUDA (and not least running games!) couldn't be done on Linux without a labyrinthine network of proprietary drivers that, for instance, couldn't be updated automatically.

It seems as if Nvidia succeeded, because from my passive awareness of the PC gaming world, people seem very happy with their new GPUs. But for those using Linux for servers, at home or for AI research, it has been an ongoing nightmare.

[latchkey]

That lock was broken with the NVIDIA leak.

H100's were not used for mining.

Regardless, in general, there is little demand for GPUs for mining any longer after ETH switched to PoS.