While the research into MIMO communications algorithms have reached levels of development that show important wireless systems performance improvements, the development of DSP systems to implement them has limited implementations to the simplest and least performing algorithms. This paper addresses this technological gap by studying how to design DSP systems to better handle the increased complexity arising from the operations typical of MIMO algorithms. Two approaches are considered: adding new instructions to the DSP instruction set and adding a hardware accelerator to the DSP system. Of the two approaches, the second was concluded to be best, resulting in notable processing speedups and more efficient use of the computational resources.