Tech journalism should help. It’s basically curation. I also don’t follow CPUs constantly. When I need to buy CPUs, I go to a few publications (say Ars Technica), search their archives for discussions of CPUs published within the last two years and see what the editors think.

Of course it’s only a solution if you are buying. If you writing low-level software for these outside userspace, I suppose you’ll have to follow the development of CPUs.