The present disclosure provides example operation accelerators and compression methods. One example operation accelerator includes a storage configured to store first input data, weight data, and a control instruction, and an operation circuit connected to the storage and configured to perform matrix multiplication on the first input data and the weight data, to obtain a computation result. The operation accelerator further includes a compression module configured to compress the computation result to obtain compressed data, as well as a controller connected to the storage and configured to obtain the control instruction from the storage, and when the control instruction includes instructions to compress the computation result, control the compression module to compress the computation result to obtain the compressed data. The operation accelerator further includes a direct memory access controller connected to the compression module and configured to store the compressed data in a memory outside the operation accelerator.