Trigger the Creation of a Specific Preference List?
Solution 1:
In case you're still trying to do this, I just figured out how to generate the file on my Mac running Mac OS X 10.13.6 (17G65).
It's remarkably simple. The file seems to be generated once you select “About This Mac” from the menu, as shown here:
Before that, "$HOME/Library/Preferences/com.apple.SystemProfiler.plist" did not exist.
After that, I could run
defaults read "$HOME/Library/Preferences/com.apple.SystemProfiler.plist" 'CPU Names'
and get the result I was looking for.