Good catch. I didn't notice the factorization difference.
I myself definitely meant gigabits per second. 120Gbps is about what 2x 8k 60Hz monitors use at a constant rate in the simplest sense (pixels), so that's what I assumed they were talking about.
But it's more complex than that.
Looking a bit deeper: It seems that TB5 (which uses USB C) is natively a symmetric 80Gbps: 80Gbps one way, and 80Gbps the other way. 160Gbps, total, counting both directions -- plus or minus overhead.
It can also use a "turbo" mode where things are shifted to be 120Gbps one way (host-to-device) and 40Gbps the other way (device-to-host), which is still 160Gbps in aggregate.
It isn't clear how that dual-8k-display mode provides any extra bandwidth for other things that may be downstream like storage devices, but that's as deep as I feel like going.
And that is deep enough to answer your question: It is definitely in the neighborhood of [up to] 120Gbps [in one direction], and it is definitely never in the neighborhood of 120GBps [neither in any direction, nor in aggregate].
I myself definitely meant gigabits per second. 120Gbps is about what 2x 8k 60Hz monitors use at a constant rate in the simplest sense (pixels), so that's what I assumed they were talking about.
But it's more complex than that.
Looking a bit deeper: It seems that TB5 (which uses USB C) is natively a symmetric 80Gbps: 80Gbps one way, and 80Gbps the other way. 160Gbps, total, counting both directions -- plus or minus overhead.
It can also use a "turbo" mode where things are shifted to be 120Gbps one way (host-to-device) and 40Gbps the other way (device-to-host), which is still 160Gbps in aggregate.
It isn't clear how that dual-8k-display mode provides any extra bandwidth for other things that may be downstream like storage devices, but that's as deep as I feel like going.
And that is deep enough to answer your question: It is definitely in the neighborhood of [up to] 120Gbps [in one direction], and it is definitely never in the neighborhood of 120GBps [neither in any direction, nor in aggregate].