Techniques for implementing blending equations for various blending modes with a base set of operations are described. Each blending equation may be decomposed into a sequence of operations. In one design, a device includes a processing unit that implements a set of operations for multiple blending modes and a storage unit that stores operands and results. The processing unit receives a sequence of instructions for a sequence of operations for a blending mode selected from the plurality of blending modes and executes each instruction in the sequence to perform blending in accordance with the selected blending mode. The processing unit may include (a) an ALU that performs at least one operation in the base set, e.g., a dot product, (b) a pre-formatting unit that performs gamma correction and alpha scaling of inbound color values, and (c) a post-formatting unit that performs gamma compression and alpha scaling of outbound color values.