Described herein is a graphics processing unit (GPU) configured to receive an instruction having multiple operands, where the instruction is a single instruction multiple data (SIMD) instruction configured to use a bfloat16 (BF16) number format and the BF16 number format is a sixteen-bit floating point format having an eight-bit exponent. The GPU can process the instruction using the multiple operands, where to process the instruction includes to perform a multiply operation, perform an addition to a result of the multiply operation, and apply a rectified linear unit function to a result of the addition.