A 192 Gbps Cable Standard Enters Mass Production

Shanghai HiSilicon said on 17 July 2026 that televisions built around its GPMI chips had reached close to one million units, with almost every major Chinese television brand in volume production - a milestone that arrived faster than most interface standards manage. GPMI stands for General Purpose Multimedia Interface, was developed under the Shenzhen 8K Ultra High Definition Video Industry Collaboration Alliance with more than fifty companies including Huawei, Skyworth, Hisense and TCL, and now has eleven group standards published, six industry standards approved in December 2025 and in force since July 2026. The Type-B connector is specified at 192Gbps, 480W of power delivery and 8K120 video over one reversible cable that also carries data, network and bidirectional control; the Type-C variant shares the USB-C form factor at 96Gbps and 240W and supports 128-node mesh networking.

Three of those numbers matter to professional AV more than the headline bandwidth. First, 480W over the same cable that carries the picture: HDBaseT delivers 100W, USB-C extended power range stops at 240W, so a display that powers its own source changes what a rack, a floor box or a ceiling void has to provide. Second, mesh topology: GPMI explicitly supports many-to-many distribution, where pro AV still sells point-to-point matrices and one-to-many multicast streams. Third, symmetric control: the source can address the display and the display can address the source, which is the arrangement installers have been approximating with CEC and IR for fifteen years.

The reality check is just as important. GPMI's installed base is domestic consumer television and operator set-top boxes - Hunan Cable's micro set-top box pilot at a Changsha hotel cut cabling cost by 40 percent, and Jiangsu Cable is following - not conference rooms, lecture theatres or control rooms. There is no announced roadmap for matrix switchers, extenders or SDI gateways, the Hi3161 bridge chips address consumer, commercial display and PC ecosystems but not broadcast interfaces, and field termination, cable certification and long-run behaviour are undocumented for installers. Specifying GPMI into a tender today would be a bet on an ecosystem rather than a procurement decision.

What an integrator can do now is treat it as a design input. Power per port will keep rising, so cable routes and rack power should be planned above today's PoC figures; topology should stay flexible enough to accept many-to-many distribution without re-pulling; and any endpoint chosen for a five-year estate should keep its HDMI and HDBaseT interfaces first-class. Amtune builds the current generation of that layer - seamless hybrid matrices, HDBaseT and category-cable extenders and signal converters - with per-port power budgets documented for the installer. Enquiries: sales@amtune.com.