Mechanisms are provided for performing a floating point arithmetic operation in a data processing system. A plurality of floating point operands of the floating point arithmetic operation are received and bits in a mantissa of at least one floating point operand of the plurality of floating point operands are shifted. One or more bits of the mantissa that are shifted outside a range of bits of the mantissa of at least one floating point operand are stored and a vector value is generated based on the stored one or more bits of the mantissa that are shifted outside of the range of bits of the mantissa of the at least one floating point operand. A resultant value is generated for the floating point arithmetic operation based on the vector value and the plurality of floating point operands.