In an embodiment, a floating point unit (FPU) comprises an adder configured to add a first mantissa and a second mantissa and an operand adjust unit coupled to provide at least the first mantissa to the adder. The operand adjust unit is coupled to receive a first operand and a second operand for a floating point add operation, and is configured to: right shift at least one mantissa corresponding to one of the first and second operands responsive to a shift count generated from exponent portions of the first and second operands; to detect whether or not neither, one, or both of the first and second operands are subnormal numbers in parallel with at least a portion of the right shifting; and to left shift by one bit the right shifted mantissa responsive to only one of the first and second operands being a subnormal floating point number.