GPMI delivers 4x bandwidth of HDMI 2.1, 480W of power over a single cable

We may soon have a new display cable standard — GPMI. It stands for General Purpose Media Interface, and it is developed by the Shenzhen 8K UHD Video Industry Cooperation Alliance. As you might have gleaned from the name of the group behind the standard, GPMI is designed to handle 8K while also reducing the cables needed for an 8K-capable system. As it stands, GPMI is coming in two different flavors: GPMI Type-C which is based on the USB-C standard, as well as GPMI Type-B, which uses what seems to be a new proprietary connector. Not to be confused with USB Type-B, by the way.

New GPMI standard supports 192Gbps bandwidth and 480W of power delivery

In its GPMI Type-C form will support 96Gbps of bandwidth and deliver up to 240W of power over a standard USB-C port. This is a pip above what Thunderbolt 5 can handle (80Gbps + 240W), and clearly blows DisplayPort 2.1 (80Gbps) and HDMI 2.1 FRL (48Gbps) out of the water. The latter, especially. In any case, this standard, which will be dubbed GPMI Type-C, will likely be the more commonly adopted one, as it doesn’t require tooling for an all-new port and OEMs will likely just need to shell out for a GPMI controller.

For the more impressive GPMI Type-B that carries 192Gbps of bandwidth and 480W of power delivery, we will be looking at a new connector that appears significantly wider to support more connections. While the 192Gbps bandwidth is incredible, what’s more impressive is that the bandwidth is split across 8 channels, and the channels can be configured independently for bidirectional data transfer between devices. This means that GPMI can also handle networking data.

As GPMI is developed by the Shenzhen 8K UHD Video Industry Cooperation Alliance, adoption will be spearheaded by Chinese companies, naturally. TCL, Hisense, HUAWEI and BOE are on board, so we will probably see GPMI-ready devices come from them first.