respond to 2) I always thought it didn’t really matter if one went exactly through all the data (unless there is some empirical study or theorem I am not aware of that shows why contingent pass of the data is desirable). As far as I know the strengths of SGD is because its actually stochastic (e.g. https://cbmm.mit.edu/publications/musings-deep-learning-properties-sgd 9). I am not sure if doing such a deterministic way of going through the data (i.e. contiguous) breaks the benefits of the stochasticity.
respond to 1) Models need contiguous data in each batch? what? what do you mean they “need”? They need because of the code or because of statistical benefit? I’ve never heard that before.