An apparatus for performing LSTM neural network operations and an operating method are provided. The device comprises a direct memory access unit, an instruction cache unit, a controller unit, a plurality of data cache units arranged in parallel and a plurality of data processing modules arranged in parallel, wherein the plurality of data processing modules are in one-to-one correspondence with the data cache units, and are used for obtaining input data from the corresponding data cache units and weights and offsets required during operation, and performing LSTM neural network operation; and parallel operation is executed among the plurality of data processing modules. According to the method, special instructions are adopted for operation, the number of instructions required by operationis greatly reduced, and decoding expenditure is reduced; caching the weight and the bias, so that the data transmission overhead is reduced; the method is not limited to the specific application field, can be used in the fields of voice recognition, text translation, music synthesis and the like, and is high in expandability; and the plurality of data processing modules operate in parallel, so that the operation speed of the LSTM network is remarkably improved.