Real-time digital sonar beamforming is a computationally intensive algorithm that has been implemented in the past primarily in custom embedded hardware. With recent advancements in native signal processing extensions for general-purpose processors, it is possible to implement sonar beamforming using off-the-shelf hardware. Current implementation on a Sun UltraSPARC multiprocessor suggests a very promising platform for transitioning such applications to general-purpose systems. This paper proposes to