building a cross compiler

[warm38 at juno.com]

anyone have a suggestion as to how to build a powerpc-elf
cross compiler under cygwin?  I think I need to because
make is not passing any parameters (or anything else) to bin/as.
When I download the source, even the configure script with 
target=powerpc-elf
configure --target=$target --prefix=$prefix -v
against the binutils the 'make all install' has problems because 
it still keeps setting ARCH_i386 not ARCH_ppc.

any pointers to getting on first base?

wade