In this paper we investigate the Sum Absolute Difference (SAD) operation, an operation frequently used by a number of algorithms for digital motion estimation. For such operation, we propose a single vector instruction that can be performed (in hardware) on an entire block of data in parallel. We investigate possible implementations for such an instruction. Assuming a machine cycle comparable to the cycle of a two cycle multiply, we show that for a block of 16x1 or 16x16, the SAD operation can be performed in 3 or 4 machine cycles respectively. The proposed implementation operates as follows: first we determine in parallel which of the operands is the smallest in a pair of operands. Second we compute the absolute value of the difference of each pairs by subtracting the smallest value from the largest and finally we compute the accumulation. The operations associated with the second and the third step are performed in parallel resulting in a multiply (accumulate) type of operation. Our approach covers also the Mean Absolute Difference (MAD) operation at the exclusion of a shifting (division) operation.