Apparatuses and methods are provided for reducing power consumption in a pattern-recognition processor. A power control circuit may be coupled to a block of programmed state machines to enable selective activation and deactivation of the block during a pattern search. The block may be deactivated if the pattern search is no longer active in that block and activated when needed by the pattern search. Additionally, the block may be deactivated based on an identifier of the data stream being searched. Excess blocks not used for any programmed state machines may be disabled such that they are not refreshed during a memory cycle.