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National Semiconductor ran into financial trouble soon after the Cyrix merger, and these problems hurt Cyrix as well. By 1999, AMD and Intel were leapfrogging one another in clock speeds, reaching 450 MHz and beyond while Cyrix took almost a year to push the MII from PR-300 to PR-333. Neither chip actually ran at 300 MHz. A problem suffered by many of the MII models was that they used a non-standard 83MHz bus. The vast majority of Socket 7 motherboards used a fixed 1/2 divider to clock the [[PCI bus]], normally at 30MHz or 33MHz. With the MII's 83MHz bus, this resulted in the PCI bus running alarmingly out of spec at 41.5MHz. At this speed, many PCI devices could become unstable or fail to operate. Some motherboards supported a 1/3 divider, which resulted in the PCI bus running at 27.7MHz. This was more stable, but adversely affected system performance. The problem was only fixed in the final few models, which supported a 100MHz bus. Meanwhile, the MediaGX faced pressure from Intel's and AMD's budget chips, which also continued to get less expensive while offering much greater performance. Cyrix, whose product had been considered a performance product in 1996, had fallen to the mid-range, then the entry level, and to the fringe of the entry level and was in danger of completely losing its market.
The last Cyrix-badged microprocessor was the Cyrix MII-433 which ran at 300MHz(100x3) and performed faster than an AMD K62-300 on FPU calculations(as benched with Dr. Hardware).
However, this chip was regularly pitted against ACTUAL 433MHz processors from other manufacturers, making the comparison unfair.
National Semiconductor distanced itself from the CPU market, and without direction, the Cyrix engineers left one by one. By the time National Semiconductor sold Cyrix to [[VIA Technologies]], the design team was no more and the market for the MII had disappeared. VIA used the Cyrix name on a chip designed by [[Centaur Technology]], since VIA believed Cyrix had better name recognition than Centaur, or possibly even VIA.
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