Hardware accelerator templates and design frameworks for implementing recurrent neural networks (RNNs) and variants thereof are described. A design framework module obtains a flow graph for an RNN algorithm. The flow graph identifies operations to be performed to implement the RNN algorithm and further identifies data dependencies between ones of the operations. The operations include matrix operations and vector operations. The design framework module maps the operations of the flow graph to an accelerator hardware template, yielding an accelerator instance comprising register transfer language code that describes how one or more matrix processing units and one or more vector processing units are to be arranged to perform the RNN algorithm. At least one of the one or more MPUs, as part of implementing the RNN algorithm, is to directly provide or directly receive a value from one of the one or more VPUs.