A wide range of applications involve matrix decompositions which can be computed using givens rotations. A programmable processor for givens rotations offers more flexibility than highly tailored systolic array hardware implementations. The programmable processor design presented in this paper employs an approximate rotations method to compute givens rotations. Instantiations of this programmable processor can then be arranged/configured (i.e. in arrays of varying size and dimension) according to the requirements of the target application. Another advantage of this approach is that the processor can be programmed to compute different algorithms (e.g. QR decomposition, singular-value decomposition or a combination of both)