A disclosed speech processor includes a front end to receive a speech input and generate a feature vector indicative of a portion of the speech input and a Gaussian mixture (GMM) circuit to receive the feature vector, model any one of a plurality of GMM speech recognition algorithms, and generate a GMM score for the feature vector based on the GMM speech recognition algorithm modeled. In at least one embodiment, the GMM circuit includes a common compute block to generate feature a vector sum indicative of a weighted sum of differences squares between the feature vector and a mixture component of the GMM speech recognition algorithm. In at least one embodiment, the GMM speech recognition algorithm being modeled includes a plurality of Gaussian mixture components and the common compute block is operable to generate feature vector scores corresponding to each of the plurality of mixture components.