Methods and apparatus for efficient data transmit and receive operations using polling of memory queues associated with interconnect fabric interface. In one embodiment, Non-Transparent Bridge (NTB) technology used to transact the data transmit/receive operations and a hardware accelerator card used implement a notification mechanism in order to optimize of receive queue polling are disclosed. The accelerator card comprises a notification address configured to signal the presence of data, and a notification acknowledgement region configured to store flags associated with memory receive queues. In one implementation, the interconnect fabric is based on PCIe technology, including up to very large fabrics and numbers of hosts/devices for use in ultra-high performance applications such as for example data centers and computing clusters.