A system and a method are configured to improve the performance of general-purpose processors by implementing a functional unit that computes the product of a matrix operand with a vector operand, producing a vector result. The functional unit fully utilizes the entire resources of a 128 b by 128 b multiplier regardless of the operand size, as the number of elements of the matrix and vector operands increase as operand size is reduced. The unit performs both fixed-point and floating-point multiplications and additions with the highest-possible intermediate accuracy with modest resources.