A new Chinese-made cable capable of 8K wired connections could soon make your Thunderbolt cable seem like a VGA cable. Designed to handle ultra-high-resolution content and serious power delivery simultaneously, the 8K-capable cable could simplify setups for gamers, streamers, and power users alike.
The new standard from China is called the General Purpose Media Interface, or GPMI. It comes from the Shenzhen 8K UHD Video Industry Cooperation Alliance, a group made up of over 50 Chinese tech companies. It’s designed with 8K video in mind, and the group says the cable should help reduce clutter by combining high-speed data and high-wattage power into a single cord.
The 8K cable currently comes in two versions: a Type-C version, which uses the latest USB-C standard. This variation supports 96 Gbps bandwidth and up to 240 watts of power, which more than doubles the speed of Thunderbolt 4 and matches USB4’s power output. Thunderbolt 5, which launched in 2024, also supports up to 240 watts of power and tops out at 80Gbps of bi-directional bandwidth (120Gbps with bandwidth boost.)
However, the real showstopper is the Chinese group’s proprietary Type-B connector, which delivers up to 192 Gbps of bandwidth through the 8K cable and 480 watts of power. That’s more than enough power to support an 8K display and could even charge a high-performance gaming laptop at the same time.
The new cable is a massive leap over other standards available right now. HDMI 2.1 tops out at 48 Gbps with no power output, while DisplayPort 2.1 reaches 80 Gbps. Thunderbolt 4 caps out at 40 Gbps of bandwidth and 100 watts of power. As such, nothing currently in wide use matches the capabilities promised by this Chinese 8K cable, but Thunderbolt 5 is slowly spreading.
Beyond speed and power, GPMI also includes features like unified control—similar to HDMI-CEC—allowing a single remote to manage all connected devices. In theory, this means fewer wires and fewer power connectors. Of course, the cable’s high power ceiling won’t power your entire gaming PC just yet.
But, reports say it should be enough to power a portable workstation running dedicated graphics. For those who prefer to keep their more powerful setups portable, this Chinese 8K cable could be the exact thing we need to usher in the next generation of computer power and display cables.
Whether GPMI will expand beyond China is still uncertain, but based on specs alone, the Chinese 8K cable looks very promising, though the use of a proprietary connector for the best speeds undoes a lot of the work that has been done in recent years to standardize power connectors for electronics—especially since even Apple has ditched its proprietary connectors in favor of USB-C.
