An apparatus and method of emulating a hardware accelerator engine over an interconnect link such as PCI Express (PCIe) link. In one embodiment, the accelerator emulation mechanism is implemented inside a PCIe Host Bridge which is integrated into a host IC or chipset. The accelerator emulation mechanism provides an interface compatible with other integrated accelerators thereby eliminating the overhead of maintaining different programming models for local and remote accelerators. Co-processor requests issued by threads requesting a service (client threads) targeting remote accelerator are queued and sent to a PCIe adapter and remote accelerator engine over a PCIe link. The remote accelerator engine performs the requested processing task, delivers results back to host memory and the PCIe Host Bridge performs co-processor request completion sequence (status update, write to flag, interrupt) include in the co-processor command.