A technique for sorting packed numbers of two operands into minima or maxima operand with their indices to identify the origin of those selected values. After packing two source operands with a plurality of data elements containing numerical values, greater-than comparison operation is performed on the two operands to generate a mask. The mask is used to identify those corresponding pair of data elements of the first and second operands which need to be passed through the subsequent stages in order to generate a sorted minima or maxima. The operands are AND'ed with the mask or the complement of the mask to generate the required minima/maxima result. The same AND'ing technique is used with two other operands containing indices of the values in the first two operands. The indices identify the originating location of the sorted maxima/minima.