I wish more hardware companies would publish more documentation and let the community figure out the rest, sort of like what happened to the original IBM VGA (look up "Mode X" and the other non-BIOS modes the hardware is actually capable of - even 800x600x16!) Sadly it seems the majority of them would rather tightly control every aspect of their products' usage since they can then milk the userbase for more $$$, but IMHO the most productive era of the PC was also when it was the most open.
But it wouldn't if all cards supporting this were "unlocked" by default and thus the other "enterprise-grade" cards weren't that much more expensive. Of course that'd reduce profits by a lot.
it probably would - you saw exactly that outcome with mining.
for a lot of these demand bursts, demand is so high it cannot be sated even consuming 100% or 200% of typical GPU production.
cards like RX 6500XT that simply don't have the RAM to participate were less affected, but even then you've got enough cross-elasticity (demand from people being crowded out of other product segments) that tends to pump prices to 2-3x the "normal" clearance prices we see today. And yes, absolutely anything that can mine in any capacity will get pulled in during that sort of boom/bubble, not just "high-end"/"enterprise".
If I'm a hardware manufacturer and my soft lock on product feature doesn't work, I'll switch to a hardware lock instead, and the product will just cost more.
> the most productive era of the PC was also when it was the most open
The openness certainly was great but it's not actually required. People can figure out how to work with closed systems. Adversarial interoperability was common. People would reverse engineer things and make the software work whether or not the manufacturer wanted it.
It's the software and hardware locks that used to be rare and are now common. Cryptography was supposed to be something that would empower us but it ended up being used against us to lock us out of our own machines. We're no longer in the driver's seat. Our operating systems don't even operate the system anymore. Our free Linux systems are just the "user OS" in the manufacturer's unknowable amalgamation of silicon running proprietary firmware, just a little component to be sandboxed away from the real action.
That's a huge overstatement, it's a big part of the moat for sure, but there are other significant components (hardware, ecosystem lock-in, heavy academic incentives)
No software -> hardware is massively hobbled. Evidence: AMD.
Ecosystem -> Software. At the moment especially people are looking for arbitrages everywhere i.e. inference costs / being able to inference at all (llama.cpp)
Academics -> Also software but easily fiddled with a bit of spending as you say.
