http://www.mathworks.com/help/matlab/ref/perms.html [Limitations: perms(v) is practical when length(v) is less than about 10.]
It's quite a big matrix, but it should be able to do the operation if you don't have lots of data already loaded on your workspace.
For n=10 number of permutations is 10! = 3628800 so the size of v is 3628800x10, by default it will do it on double so 0.27Gb. Have you tried to do the operation in uint8?
v = perms(uint8(1:10));
