A system, circuit and method for improving system-on-chip (SoC) bandwidth performance for high latency peripheral read accesses using a bridge circuit are disclosed. In one embodiment, the SoC includes the bridge circuit, one or more bus masters, at least one high bandwidth bus slave and at least one low bandwidth bus slave that are communicatively coupled via a high bandwidth bus and a low bandwidth bus. Further, the bus masters access the at least one low bandwidth bus slave by issuing an early read transaction request in advance to a scheduled read transaction request. Furthermore, the bridge circuit receives the early read transaction request and fetches data associated with the early read transaction request. In addition, the bridge circuit receives the scheduled read transaction request. The fetched data is then sent to the bus masters upon receiving the scheduled read transaction request.