Trigger the Creation of a Specific Preference List?
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.