Automatic fire detection has become more and more appealing because of the increasing use of video capabilities in surveillance systems used for early detection of fire. However, its high computational complexities limit its use in real-time applications. To meet the real-time processing of today's fire detection techniques, this study proposes a single instruction, multiple data many-core model. To design an efficient many-core model for image processing applications such as fire detection, a key design parameter is the image data-per-processing-element (IDPE) variation of the many-core system, which is the amount of image data directly mapped to each processing element PE. This study quantitatively evaluates the impact of the IDPE variation on system performance and energy efficiency for the multi-stage fire detection approach that consists of movement-containing region detection, color segmentation, fire feature extraction of fires, and decision making if there is a fire or non-fire in a processing video frame. In this study, we use six IDPE ratios to determine an optimal many-core model that provides the most efficient operation for fire detection using architectural and workload simulation. Experimental results indicate that the most efficient many-core model is achieved at the 64 IDPE value in terms of the worst-case execution time and energy 123 J. Seo et al. efficiency. In addition, this study compares the performance of the most efficient manycore configuration with that of a commercial graphics processing unit (Nvidia GeForce GTX 480) to show the improved performance of the proposed many-core model for the fire detection algorithm. This many-core configuration outperforms the commercial graphic processing unit in the worst-case execution time and energy efficiency.