Abstract: A method operates within an integrated circuit having a plurality of processing lanes. For each of a first and second processing lanes, the method determines a number of packed data words among one or more packed data words associated with the respective processing lane, associates the number of packed data words with a used field of the processing lane, wherein the used field indicates the number of packed data words in the processing lane; and stores the one or more packed data words in a variable record length memory based, at least in part, on the used field of the processing lane.