[D][R]What type of data streams(`im2col` matrix or regular conv) do commercial NPUs typically use for CNN? And where are `im2col` implemented, softwave(CPU) or HW accelerator for those situations where `im2col` is required？

(I post this in several subreddit.)
I'm gonna design an NN accelerator on FPGA. For NN, the basic operation is matrix-vector mult or matrix-matrix mult. And `GEMM+im2col` is easy to implement and many kinds of NN can be mapped on the designed accelerator based on `GEMM+im2col` easily. The disadvantage of it is that a little bit more bandwidth is required. I think it is a little tricky to design address-gen unit for the method of regular convolution when reading input …

accelerator basic cnn commercial cpu data data streams design fpga machinelearning matrix type vector