Systems and methods for performing a rake-finger operation on a vector processor are described herein. In one embodiment, a method for rake-finger processing comprises loading samples from a register into an execution unit, performing a rake-finger operation on the samples in the execution unit, and writing results from the rake-finger operation to the register. Performing the rake-finger operation comprises performing a finite impulse response (FIR) filter operation, and performing a despread operation, wherein filtered samples from the FIR filter operation are input to the despread operation without going through the register.