An embodiment of an apparatus performs a floating-point multiply-add process on a first multiplicand, a second multiplicand, and an addend. A leading 0 bit is added to a mantissa of the first multiplicand to form an expanded first mantissa, and a partial-product multiplication is performed on the expanded first mantissa and a mantissa of the second multiplicand to produce partial-product sum and a partial-product carry mantissas. Leading bits of the partial-product sum and carry mantissas are changed to 0 bits if they are both 1 bits, and the partial-product sum and the partial-product carry are shifted right according to an exponent difference of a product of the first multiplicand and the second multiplicand. Otherwise both the partial-product sum and carry mantissas are arithmetically shifted right according to the exponent difference. The first and second multiplicands and the addend can be complex numbers.