The present disclosure advantageously provides a system, matrix multiply accelerator (MMA) and method for efficiently multiplying matrices. The MMA includes a vector register to store the row vectors of one input matrix, a vector register to store the column vectors of another input matrix, a vector register to store an output matrix, and an array of vector multiply and accumulate (VMAC) units coupled to the vector registers. Each VMAC unit is coupled to at least two row vector signal lines and at least two column vector signal lines, and is configured to calculate the dot product for one element i,j of the output matrix by multiplying each row vector formed from the ith row of the first matrix with a corresponding column vector formed from the jth column of the second matrix to generate intermediate products, and accumulate the intermediate products into a scalar value.