A method to quickly determine whether a macroblock in H.264 or other similar standards should be encoded in skip mode in a SIMD processor environment is provided. The method exploits the fact that the processor provides enough register space to store N=4 4×4 set of 8 bits data. By performing 4 consecutive reads of 16 linear aligned values into 16 SIMD register variables each capable of storing 16 values, the entire data set for operating can be stored within the processors SIMD register variables and can be operated upon, without any memory related latency.