From what I understand, one of the factors to not focus on Asahi Linux on M3 for now is the lack of an M3 Mac Mini which supposedly makes the development easier.

The M3 GPU added a bunch of features including ray tracing. The "dynamic caching" sounds like a big change to local memory which could require serious driver changes.

https://www.theverge.com/2023/10/30/23938676/apple-m3-chip-g...

M3 GPU uses a new instruction encoding, among other things. Also, it has a new memory partitioning scheme (aka. Dynamic Caching), which probably requires a bunch of changes to both the driver interface and the shader compiler. I hope the Asahi team will get to publishing the details of M3 soon, I have been curious about this for a while.

I don't know how different but it apparently has dramatically improved hardware shaders compared to earlier M chips so I'm guessing that a lot of this might be different, there.

M3 and M4 haven't been supported yet because they weren't a priority (looks like they've been focusing on gaming support for the last year or so).

Alyssa said in her talk that they'll probably get it working in 6 months or so: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pDsksRBLXPk&t=2932s

Yes. And also some other peripherals are different.

last I check you can't even buy M1 macs on apple's website anymore (maybe it's region dependent)