HDMI has been the main connector of choice for living rooms for decades. It connects TVs to consoles, to Blu-ray players, to A/V systems, and it’s even a great secondary connector for gaming PC owners who’d rather not use DisplayPort. But as much as HDMI has improved over the years, it’s also fallen behind some […]
HDMI has been the main connector of choice for living rooms for decades. It connects TVs to consoles, to Blu-ray players, to A/V systems, and it’s even a great secondary connector for gaming PC owners who’d rather not use DisplayPort. But as much as HDMI has improved over the years, it’s also fallen behind some of the competition, namely coming out of China.
A new connector type, GPMI, was recently announced, and along with USB-C compatibility, it has options to more than double the available bandwidth of even HDMI 2.2, and it offers power delivery far in excess of anything else out there; USB4 included.
But while this new Chinese standard has the potential to steal the jewels from HDMI’s crown and run off with them into the sunset, it’s not likely to be competitive with HDMI any time soon; at least in Western markets.What is GPMI?
GPMI, or the imaginatively named, General Purpose Media Interface connector and cable, was announced in early April and made a big splash when it did. Created by the Shenzhen International 8K Ultra High Definition Video Industry Collaboration Alliance (SUCA), this Chinse group is made up of major brands like TCL, Hisense, and the Western-ostracized Huawei.
Following the repudiation of Chinese brands’ involvement with major technological infrastructure projects like 5G, Chinese brands moved forward internally and looked to develop new, competing standards, and GPMI is just one of those attempts.
GPMI comes in two main flavors at the time of writing: GPMI Type-C, and GPMI Type-B. The former, is the more-universally designed, USB-C equivalent, with USB-C compatibility that is fully certified and legitimately supportive of USB-C connections. If you have a USB-C device, it should work just fine with GMPI Type-C.
That connector is the less impressive of the two, but still very capable, offering up to a 96 Gbps data transfer rate (equivalent to HDMI 2.2) and up to a 240W power delivery system, which is akin go the best USB4 connectors and allows for super fast charging. That’s something that HDMI doesn’t offer at all, and though it’s not something HDMI was designed for, power delivery is an increasingly useful capability for a cable connector, and one that gives USB-C and its equivalents (like GPMI) a significant advantage over HDMI in certain scenarios.
But that’s just the start with GPMI. The Type-B standard is proprietary, so lacks any kind of interchangeability with USB-C, but where it lacks that support, it more than makes up for it in its capabilities and shows that the Chinese companies behind it aren’t just looking to compete with HDMI, they’re hoping to one day supplant it.
If the specs are anything to by, that could be possible in the not-so-distant future. And it’ll give just about every other cable type a run for their money, too.
GPMI Type-B has a total bandwidth capability of up to 192 Gbps.
