The present invention relates to a real-time wideband compressor for multi-dimensional data. The compressor comprises a plurality of compression engines for simultaneously compressing a plurality of data subsets of a set of input data vectors and providing compressed data thereof using one of SAMVQ or HSOCVQ data compression. Each compression engine comprises an along spectral vectors codevector trainer as well as an across spectral bands codevector trainer. The compression engines are programmable to perform either along spectral vectors codevector training or across spectral bands codevector training in combination with one of the SAMVQ or HSOCVQ techniques without changing hardware. The compressor further comprises a network switch for partitioning the set of input data vectors into the plurality of data subsets, for providing each of the plurality of data subsets to one of the plurality of compression engines, and for transmitting the compressed data. The real-time wideband compressor is highly advantageous in, for example, space applications by programmable enabling performance of different techniques of codevector training as well as different techniques of VQ. Furthermore, after the compression process is started the compression process is performed autonomously without external communication.