A system and method to compress application control data, such as weights for a layer of a convolutional neural network, is disclosed. A multi-core system for executing at least one layer of the convolutional neural network includes a storage device storing a compressed weight matrix of a set of weights of the at least one layer of the convolutional network and a decompression matrix. The compressed weight matrix is formed by matrix factorization and quantization of a floating point value of each weight to a floating point format. A decompression module is operable to obtain an approximation of the weight values by decompressing the compressed weight matrix through the decompression matrix. A plurality of cores executes the at least one layer of the convolutional neural network with the approximation of weight values to produce an inference output.