Embodiments of apparatuses and methods for copying and operating on matrix elements are described. In embodiments, an apparatus includes a hardware instruction decoder to decode a single instruction and execution circuitry, coupled to hardware instruction decoder, to perform one or more operations corresponding to the single instruction. The single instruction has a first operand to reference a base address of a first representation of a source matrix and a second operand to reference a base address of second representation of a destination matrix. The one or more operations include copying elements of the source matrix to corresponding locations in the destination matrix and filling empty elements of the destination matrix with a single value.