One or more of the present techniques provide a compute engine buffer configured to maneuver data and increase the efficiency of a compute engine. One such compute engine buffer is connected to a compute engine which performs operations on operands retrieved from the buffer, and stores results of the operations to the buffer. Such a compute engine buffer includes a compute buffer having storage units which may be electrically connected or isolated, based on the size of the operands to be stored and the configuration of the compute engine. The compute engine buffer further includes a data buffer, which may be a simple buffer. Operands may be copied to the data buffer before being copied to the compute buffer, which may save additional clock cycles for the compute engine, further increasing the compute engine efficiency.